Frost & Sullivan last night presented 16 awards to the best and brightest in the Australian Information & Communications Technology (ICT) industry at the 2008 Frost & Sullivan Australia Best Practices Awards.  

A veritable ‘who’s who’ of organisations in Australia’s ICT landscape made the honour roll call of award recipients. These included Cisco Systems, Google, IBM, Polycom, Symantec, Telstra, Verizon, Vodafone, Ninemsn, News Digital Media, realestate.com.au and Fox Interactive Media.

Held for the third consecutive year, Frost & Sullivan hosted the Awards Banquet at a gala dinner in front of 100 IT industry people at Dockside in Sydney’s Cockle Bay Wharf.

The Frost & Sullivan Awards recognise outstanding performance by companies in the ICT industry in Australia. Benchmarked against leading companies in each category, the recipients of these awards represent the best-of-breed in their sector in the country.

This year’s awards were focused on five industry categories: Telecoms, Enterprise Communications, IT Security, Digital Media and Sustainable IT. Each of these awards were judged according to their market performance or customer satisfaction ratings researched from Frost & Sullivan’s demand side market surveys.

“Market performance is based on our assessment of who leads the market in terms of market share and growth over the past year. Customer satisfaction is based on the views of customers and end users on the levels of satisfaction they have with various suppliers,” says Mark Dougan, ANZ managing director, Frost & Sullivan.

This year’s inaugural Frost & Sullivan 2008 Sustainable IT Vendor of the Year was awarded to IBM Australia. The other awards announced last night included:

The other awards announced last night included:

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Managed Telephony Services Market awarded to Telstra.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Enterprise Telephony Market awarded to Cisco Systems.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Unified Communications System Integrator of the Year awarded to IBM Global Technology Services.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Videoconferencing Market awarded to Polycom.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Conferencing Services Market awarded to Telstra.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Contact Centre Applications Market awarded to Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Secure Content Management Market awarded to Symantec.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Managed Security Services Market awarded to Verizon.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Online Classifieds Advertising Market awarded to Seek.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Advertiser Satisfaction Award in the Online Classifieds Advertising Market awarded to realestate.com.au.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Online General Advertising Market awarded jointly to News Digital Media and Fox Interactive Media.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Advertiser Satisfaction Award in the Online General Advertising Market awarded to NineMSN.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Online Search Advertising Market awarded to Google.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Advertiser Satisfaction Award in the Online Search Advertising Market awarded to Google.

- The 2008 Australia Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Mobile Advertising Market awarded to Vodafone Australia.
“All of these organisations should be congratulated for their achievement over the past year operating in highly competitive markets, with many high quality vendors or suppliers competing in an increasingly tough business environment. We are delighted to honour them with a Frost & Sullivan award in recognition of their agility, resolve and success both in the marketplace, and in the minds of customers,” said Dougan.

The awards are supported by M&a, with salesforce.com as the platinum sponsor and Viocorp as the official broadcast partner. ZDNet Australia and PR Newswire are the media partners. For more information on the awards, visit http://www.frost-awards.com.au

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, partners with clients to accelerate their growth. The company's TEAM Research, Growth Consulting and Growth Team Membership empower clients to create a growth-focused culture that generates, evaluates and implements effective growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan employs over 45 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 30 offices on six continents.

For more information about Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Partnerships, visit http://www.frost.com