"This past year has separated the serious players from the accidental entrepreneurs." With those words, Mary Huss, publisher of The San Francisco Business Times, kicked off a special issue honoring "Hot Tech" achievers - companies based in the Bay Area that kept the tech flame burning and innovation alive.
Winners were chosen in 19 colorful categories including "Most Resilient" (Hewlett Packard), "Trend Bucker" (Electronic Arts) and "Pleaser" - for most fanatical following (Google). BroadVision won "The Thinker" award, for committing most resources to research and development.
BroadVision has a well-earned reputation for innovative product development, and one reason is that the company dedicates an extraordinarily high percentage of the work force - 29 percent this year - to R&D. According to The San Francisco Business Times this compares to 17 percent on R&D at Microsoft and 10 percent at Oracle.
CEO Pehong Chen sees the company's aggressive R&D spending as "a necessary risk to help customers remain competitive." In accepting the award for BroadVision, Chief Technology Officer, Shin-Yuan Tzou reinforced this sentiment, explaining that BroadVision's R&D initiatives and related investments are fueled by customer demands - specifically, a demand to "present information and business processes in context and in a secure fashion."
BroadVision's response to this demand is BroadVision 7, an enterprise business portal suite of applications that includes advanced personalization and integrated content management and commerce functionality. The U.S. Air Force chose BroadVision's enterprise business portal application after evaluating 22 portal vendors. Today, their BroadVision-powered portal consolidates information from over 28,000 legacy systems and 1,500 Air Force web sites and intranets and makes the information accessible through a personalized portal to 1.2 million users worldwide.
About the HotTech Awards
Judging criteria for the Hot Tech awards included revenue growth and estimates, funding sources, mission statements, number and status of clients and customers, partners, competitors, ability to surmount past failures and investments in future growth. Judges for the 2002 Hot Tech Awards included: Scott Gordon, director of Spencer Stuart's technology, communications and media practice; Promod Haque, managing partner with Norwest Venture Partners; Tim Miller, editor of Webmergers.com; Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Bill Schlough, CIO for the San Francisco Giants; Randy Williams, founder of Keiretsu Forum; and Mark Zanoli, managing director and co-head of technology investment banking with JPMorgan H&Q.
(Also see : http://www.broadvision.com)