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GCN Home > 04/14/08 issue

Products on the cutting edge

Sidebar: Best of FOSE 2008 honorable mentions

By GCN and Washington Technology staff

The GCN Best of FOSE Awards can only give out 14 prizes, one per category. So not surprisingly, the judging team came across a fair number of impressive entries that did not win, either because they fell short in some small detail or were edged out by a slightly more dazzling — though not necessarily competing — product. In no particular order, here were some of the serious contenders:

PacStar 6800 (From PacStar) is a portable voice over IP switch that can support more than 20,000 users. The switching equipment comes from Cisco Systems, and PacStar provides the smart container (which monitors the gear), as well as the customization for the military market. The military is nothing if not mobile, so the ability to pick up and move a phone system is a mighty appealing one, and the PacStar 6800 looks to be a rugged, well-engineered system to do the job.

Polycom introduced its high-definition video conferencing system, the HDX 4000. It is an impressive system with, as you might expect, an amazingly clear display. "It might be overkill, but it was cool," one judge said. Polycom also added a lot of nifty new features to the software, such as the ability to suppress the sound of people typing on their keyboards during presentations.

The judges were very impressed by the The Universal Imaging Utility, from Big Bang. This software allows an organization to create a single image of a desktop Windows operating system, which then can be cloned across different hardware platforms. This would be handy for maintaining a single reference OS image across computers from different manufacturers (instead of maintaining an image for each computer model), as well as for switching vendors during a hardware refresh. The software keeps track of what drivers are needed, and gets regular updates from the company. "This could be extremely useful for admins," one judge noted. The only downside, admittedly a minor one, is that it only is designed to work with Windows desktop machines, and not Windows servers.

In the handheld computing category, the rugged Nomad from Trimble got high marks for its smart design. It has a built-in Global Positioning System unit, digital camera and can work as a tablet PC. It also promises a battery life of up to six hours. We just wish it had a bit more storage space. With only 1G of solid-state storage, minus whatever space the operating system takes, it doesn't have room for many large applications.

Hewlett-Packard presented a unique offering, called Secure Key Manager, which could greatly simplify the management of key generation and storage, allowing an agency to more easily manage its public-key infrastructure. It can host up to 100,000 keys in a security-hardened appliance. We found only one potential drawback: The encrypted keys can be stored only on an LTO4 tape drive. The company has plans to expand the storage options to disk-based storage arrays within the year, so we look forward to reevaluating this product in FOSE 2009. —Joab Jackson

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