Annual List of Hits and Misses Recognize the Innovators and Disruptors Across Enterprise Technology
CUPERTINO, Calif. – December 18, 2024 – Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was named as Enterprise Technology CEO of the Year in Constellation Research’s annual 2024 Enterprise Awards. Huang was singled out for his ability to manage expontential growth, hiring for great global talent to capitalize on opportunity while setting up the capacity to grow as the GenerativeAI boom transitions into its next phase of disruption.
Salesforce and Google were named co-winners of the 2024 Enterprise Software Vendor of the Year. Salesforce was recognized for being the first vendor to unleash an agent based offering with Agentforce, thus ushering in the era of agentic AI. Google was admittedly a late contender in the category but with the launch of Gemini 2.0, the cloud player tied for the top spot by delivering on both custom algorithms and custom silicon and has pushed their lead with multimodal AI models.
The distinguished list of technology hits and misses was announced today highlighting the biggest accomplishments and downfalls in 2024. This is the sixth annual release of the Enterprise Awards, decided solely by Constellation Research’s industry analysts and experts.
“Enterprise technology vendors retooled to tell their AI story with varying degrees of success,” said R “Ray” Wang, founder and CEO at Constellation Research. “What set apart the winners was an understanding that the Age of AI has arrived and that previous technologies are relegated to the Age of the Internet.”
The AI train stayed hot in 2024 and Adobe won the top seat for the Best AI Launch with their continued efforts leveraging Firefly and expanding it’s AI introductions directly into it’s application portfolios giving customers the ability to build, create, optimize and execute with AI in the interfaces they are already utilizing.
Google Cloud Next won Best Live Event of 2024 recognized for it’s underdog growth from a few hundred attendees to 30,000+ attendees in one of the largest convention centers in Las Vegas. While the Best Enterprise Partnership went to AWS & Oracle as the deal made the leading enterprise-grade database services and leading open-source database available with the blessings of both companies on the most popular public cloud.
While top honors to the best in enterprise technology are typically hard to narrow and award, the flops of 2024 were quick to identify and call out. The Biggest Technology Flop for 2024 goes to Apple Vision Pro. “This late arrival to the already-failed Metaverse market was not only overweight, and overpriced, it suffered from a short battery life and a paltry selection of augmented reality and mixed reality content,” said Doug Henschen, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research.
While overpriced gadgets take a hit, Agentic AI takes the lead as the hottest new Enterprise Technology Category as Constellation’s analyst, Martin Schneider, notes that 2024 quickly became all about the burgeoning age of autonomous agents and any major player in software that failed to make an announcement around agentic AI was seen as lagging. “The speed of adoption was almost frighteningly fast,” said Schneider. “It is changing the way we think, build, develop, optimize and maintain software at an unprecedented rate.”
The 2024 Enterprise Award categories, winners, and runners-up are listed below:
Best Enterprise Software Vendor
Winner: Salesforce, Google
Runners up: ServiceNow, Anthropic
Best CEO
Winner: Jensen Huang, Nvidia
Runners up: Matt Garman, AWS; Barak Eilam, NICE
Best Enterprise Services Vendor
Winner: Accenture
Runners up: Persistent Systems
Best Enterprise Software Startup
Winner: Wiz
Runners up: Kong
Best AI Launch
Winner: Adobe
Runners up: Salesforce Agentforce, Major LLM providers
Best Partnership
Winner: AWS + Oracle
Runners up: ServiceNow + Five9
Best Tech Acquisition
Winner: SAP + WalkMe
Runners up: HPE + Juniper, Cohesity + Veritas
Worst Tech Acquisition
Winner: Alphabet and Anybody
Runners up: Broadcom/VMWare
Best New IPO
Winner: Reddit
Runners up: Rubrik
Best New Enterprise Category:
Winner: Agentic AI
Runners up: Decision Intelligence
Best New Enterprise Software Marketing of the Year
Winner: Atlassian
Runners up: Salesforce Agentforce
Best New Enterprise Software Ad Campaign
Winner: Jira
Runners up: Stych billboards
Best Live-Event
Winner: GoogleCloud NEXT
Runners up: AWS reinvent, HPE Discover
Biggest Tech Flop of the Year
Winner: Apple Vision Pro
Runners up: DOE FAFSA Rollout
For more about the winners and nominees of Constellation Research’s 2024 Enterprise Awards, click here.
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ABOUT CONSTELLATION RESEARCH
Constellation Research is a technology research and advisory firm based in Silicon Valley. We deliver strategic guidance to companies seeking to transform their businesses through the early adoption of disruptive technology. Our analysts draw on their experiences as practitioners to deliver pragmatic advice to CXOs leading digital transformation within their organizations. Clients include board of directors, C-suite executives, line-of-business leaders, and IT visionaries who are not afraid to challenge the status quo. Our mission is to conduct research on emerging technologies, identify and validate trends, and empower our clients to succeed in the digital economy. Constellation Research also hosts DisrupTV, a show hosted by our founder R “Ray” Wang, which features disruptive leaders and reaches 40k+ viewers each week.
Media Contact:
Elle Froze and Hannah Hock
Constellation Research
[email protected]
