Devops: CI/CD
Finalists
- Buildkite Pipelines
- Harness CI/CD
- amazee.io, a Mirantis Company Lagoon
Winner
From the winner
Harness Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery redefines efficiency in the market with its blazing speed, robust security, and cost-effectiveness, achieved through smart caching, optimized test execution, and well-tuned cloud-build machines. It empowers teams with a streamlined, script-free platform, ensuring faster and more reliable software delivery that meets compliance needs without impeding innovation. Harness offers a fast, secure, and easy-to-manage software delivery platform with AI integrated throughout the software development life cycle.
From the judges
“Harness does shine in most aspects and some beyond the core CI/CD. Using AI to optimize the build and provide insights is quite useful.”
Devops: Code quality
Finalist
- Sonar SonarQube Server
Winner
From the winner
Whether human-written or AI-generated, it’s essential for code to be carefully and accurately checked for quality and security. SonarQube Server, an open source, self-managed tool, offers a streamlined solution for fixing and avoiding code errors at the start of the development process. It’s not focused on symptoms—it gets at the source to prevent issues in the first place. It provides automatic and efficient real-time code analysis, flagging and explaining issues as they are detected, to arm developers with the right resources to produce clean code. SonarQube Server allows developers to safely harness the power of AI while minimizing risk.
From the judges
“SonarQube is like a spell checker for your code, but it can do much more than just find typos. It can check your code for many different problems, like security vulnerabilities, bugs, and poor code quality. Overall, SonarQube is a highly valuable tool that can help businesses improve their software development process.”
Devops: Observability
Finalists
- Dynatrace Platform
- Grafana Labs Grafana Cloud
- Honeycomb.io Honeycomb
Winner
- Dynatrace Platform
From the winner
In today’s digital landscape, organizations need solutions that tackle cloud complexity, turning data into actionable insights for secure, high-performance digital environments. That’s where Dynatrace comes in. Its observability and security platform provides end-to-end visibility into IT environments, offering comprehensive monitoring of applications, microservices, infrastructure, and end-user experience. What sets Dynatrace apart is its Davis AI engine. Leveraging causal, predictive, and generative AI, Davis analyzes billions of dependencies in real time, detecting anomalies, pinpointing root causes, and providing actionable insights without human intervention. This automation reduces mean time to resolution and eliminates operational blind spots, allowing teams to focus on innovation.
From the judges
“Dynatrace has a deep understanding of observability tech unlike any other and is now innovating with AI models for full-stack observability.”
Devops: Productivity
Finalist
Winner
From the winner
Develocity is Gradle’s platform for improving developer productivity and happiness. It’s the leading enabling technology for Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE), a practice pioneered by Gradle that views developer productivity as a technology challenge best addressed by engineered solutions, rather than a people problem. It focuses on process bottlenecks that most negatively impact the developer experience, including the toil and frustration associated with a lack of observability into build performance and failure root causes, slow builds, and inefficient troubleshooting. Develocity achieves this through a combination of cutting-edge acceleration technologies to maximize build and test performance.
From the judges
“The tech continues to be impactful in improving developer productivity so that features can be delivered to market quickly. Analytics and other dashboards provide insights into where the bottlenecks are across all systems.”
Devops: Security
Finalists
- Backslash Security Backslash SAST&SCA
- Harness Security Testing Orchestration
- Chainguard Images
Winner
- Harness Security Testing Orchestration
From the winner
Harness Security Testing Orchestration (STO) is shift-left security built for customers’ pipelines and designed for developers. STO integrates with over 40 commercial and open source security scanners, allowing customers the flexibility of running their preferred scanners without the complexity of managing them as a set of individual tools. STO orchestrates tests anywhere across build pipelines and normalizes, deduplicates, and prioritizes vulnerabilities, thus reducing the vulnerability count in many cases by over 90%. By enabling a proactive application security testing approach, STO reduces the risk of vulnerabilities making it into production and greatly decreases engineering toil associated with remediation rework.
From the judges
“There are several innovations here that can improve security for many devops teams, including the use of Harness AIDA (AI development assistance) to generate detailed, prescriptive remediation guidance that helps developers rapidly fix security issues in their code.”
Software development: Platforms
Finalists
- Backstage Project Authors/Cloud Native Computing Foundation Backstage
- Crowdbotics Platform
- Onfleet
Winner
- Backstage
From the winner
Backstage is an open source framework developed by Spotify and donated to the CNCF. It centralizes tools, services, and documentation behind a single pane of glass. Backstage helps manage the complexities found in a scaling developer workforce by providing developers a uniform overview of all their resources, regardless of how and where they are running. It also allows the creation of new resources, such as back-end services running in Kubernetes, with a few clicks of a button, all without having to leave the Backstage interface. Backstage’s biggest value is its ability to improve developer effectiveness by reducing friction.
From the judges
“Backstage has significantly transformed the developer experience by centralizing tools and simplifying workflows, leading to improved efficiency and faster onboarding. Its open source nature encourages continuous innovation, allowing it to evolve rapidly with contributions from a thriving community.”
Finalists
- AudioEye Accessibility Testing SDK
- The Dapr Authors/Cloud Native Computing Foundation Dapr
- Vercel v0
Winner
From the winner
Vercel v0 is the first tool that lets developers build an actual UI from scratch using nothing but text. These aren’t designs or visual representations of a UI. This is real code you can drop into your codebase and start serving to users. v0 was created to help anyone bring a website to life [regardless of] their level of technical knowledge. When building new products—whether you’re a Fortune 100 enterprise, an indie developer, or completely new to coding—staring at a blank screen is overwhelming. v0 is an ideation partner as you take a feature idea from your head, describe it in simple terms, and bring it to the web.
From the judges
“The models implemented within the solution are highly specialized and tailored to the specific problem domain, which ensures that the system operates with precision and delivers optimal results.”
About the judges
Stan Gibson is an award-winning editor, writer, and speaker, with 40 years’ experience covering information technology. Formerly executive editor of eWEEK and PC Week, and senior editor at Computerworld, he is currently adjunct analyst at IDC. As principal of Stan Gibson Communications, he writes for many websites, including CIO.com, and is a popular host for online events.
Kieran Gilmurray is CEO of Kieran Gilmurray and Company, a globally recognized authority on AI, automation, and digital transformation. Kieran has authored two influential books and hundreds of articles that have shaped industry perspectives. His expertise has earned him 10 prestigious accolades, including being named a Top 50 Global Thought Leader and Influencer on Generative AI in 2024, a Best LinkedIn Influencer for AI and Marketing, and one of the World’s Top 200 Business and Technology Innovators.
Rich Heimann is a machine learning and AI leader whose former titles include Chief AI Officer, Director of AI, Chief Data Scientist and Technical Fellow, and adjunct professor. He is the recent author of Generative Artificial Intelligence Revealed: Understanding AI from Technical Depth to Business Insights to Responsible Adoption.
Arun Krishnakumar is an ecommerce expert, author, and masterclass instructor. With extensive experience as a product engineer, he has built impactful products for multibillion-dollar international brands used by millions of users. He specializes in leveraging a data-driven approach to fuel growth, customer acquisition, retention, and user adoption for consumer products. His work centers on enhancing digital experiences and empowering ecommerce platforms to drive growth through optimized product strategy and user engagement across online and offline touchpoints.
Gaurav Mittal is a seasoned IT manager with 18+ years of leadership experience, adept at guiding teams in developing and deploying cutting-edge technology solutions. Specializing in strategic IT planning, budget management, and project execution, he excels in AWS Cloud, security protocols, and container technologies. Gaurav is skilled in Java, Python, Node.js, and CI/CD pipelines, with a robust background in database management (Aurora, Redshift, DynamoDB). His achievements include substantial cost savings through innovative solutions and enhancing operational efficiency. Gaurav is recognized for his leadership, problem-solving abilities, and commitment to delivering exceptional IT services aligned with organizational goals.
Priyank Naik is a principal engineer with 20 years of experience in the financial industry, specializing in building complex, real-time, distributed, cloud-enabled systems for front office operations, risk management, and fixed income research.
Peter Nichol is chief technology officer at OROCA Innovations. He is a 4x author, MIT Sloan, and Yale School of Management speaker dedicated to helping organizations connect strategy to execution to maximize company performance. His career has focused on driving and quantifying business value by championing disruptive technologies such as data analytics, blockchain, data science, and artificial intelligence. He was a contributing author for CIO magazine and has been recognized for digital innovations by CIO100, MIT Sloan, BRM Institute, Computerworld, and PMI.
Anton Novikau is a seasoned software development leader with eight years of experience spearheading innovative educational technology solutions. As Head of Mobile Development at Talaera, an EdTech startup, Anton drives the technical vision and execution of transformative learning experiences while pioneering AI integration across the company’s product suite. His expertise spans full-stack development, cloud architecture, and leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance educational outcomes. Anton’s contributions to the field extend beyond product development through published scientific articles exploring the intersection of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and education.
Shafeeq Ur Rahaman is an accomplished leader in data analytics and digital infrastructure, with over a decade of experience creating transformative, data-driven solutions that optimize business performance. Currently serving as the Associate Director of Analytics & Data Infrastructure at Monks, Shafeeq oversees advanced data pipeline automation, cloud architecture implementation, and strategic analytics initiatives. Recognized for his technical expertise and dedication to ethical data governance, Shafeeq brings a deep understanding of emerging technology trends and innovative applications to his role as a judge for the InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards.
Rahul Patil, hailing from the vibrant city of New York, is a seasoned professional in the tech industry with 17 years of extensive experience. Currently working at a hedge fund, he has honed his skills in back-end development with a particular focus on Java. His deep passion for technology drives him to constantly explore and utilize cloud-native services like AWS and GCP. Rahul’s dedication to his craft and his commitment to staying on the cutting edge of technological advancements truly set him apart as a remarkable technologist.
Kautilya Prasad is an accomplished digital experience platform expert. With over 17 years of experience in leading digital transformation projects for multiple Fortune 500 customers, he stands at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital experience, and data analytics, crafting solutions that enhance customer experiences. He actively engages in peer reviews, shaping the discourse around emerging technologies. He has been awarded Most Valuable Professional multiple times for his extraordinary contributions to the digital experience community. Kautilya regularly shares his thoughts by speaking at various events on topics like customer experience, ecommerce, and the impact of AI in digital marketing.
Ramprakash Ramamoorthy leads the AI efforts for Zoho Corporation. Ramprakash has been instrumental in setting up Zoho’s AI platform from scratch. He comes with a rich 12+ years of experience in building AI for the enterprises at Zoho Corp., where the AI platform currently serves over 5 billion requests per month and is growing strong. Ramprakash is a passionate leader with a level-headed approach to emerging technologies, and a sought-after speaker at technology conferences.
Monika Rathor is a lead application engineer at Level Home, where she is building smart home solutions with smart access, automation, and building intelligence solutions that improve apartment living and management in the most impactful, cost-effective way possible. She is also a performance improvement enthusiast, driven to achieving optimizations like cutting latency from 200ms to just 50ms. Monika also loves mentoring her team, helping them grow and learn. Before Level Home, Monika was at Meta, improving WhatsApp’s user integrity features. At Akamai, she had some big wins like boosting GraphQL caching hit ratios and making edge performance even better.
Isaac Sacolick is the president and founder of StarCIO, with the mission of guiding organizations in developing core competencies for digital transformation through its leadership, learning, and advisory programs. A lifelong technologist, Isaac has served in startup CTO and transformational CIO roles, then founded StarCIO believing that agile ways of working, product management, and AI/data-driven practices can empower diverse teams to drive digital transformation. Isaac is a writer, keynote speaker, and author of two books: the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital, a playbook for leading digital transformation, and Digital Trailblazer, where he shares dramatic stories and 50 lessons for transformation leaders.
Scott Schober is the president and CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, a 50-year-old, New Jersey-based provider of advanced, world-class wireless test and security solutions. He is the author of three best-selling security books: Hacked Again, Cybersecurity is Everybody’s Business, and Senior Cyber. Scott is a highly sought-after author and expert for live security events, media appearances, and commentary on the topics of ransomware, wireless threats, drone surveillance and hacking, cybersecurity for consumers, and small business. He is often seen on ABC News, Bloomberg TV, Al Jazeera America, CBS This Morning News, CNN, Fox Business, and many other networks.
