And so we reach the end of this year's batch of innovators. But, as we look at this subcategory, we find that it wraps the whole shebang into a neat package, defining what needs to be done to secure the enterprise (and prove it) and why.

All of us old-timers remember LanDesk from its days as part of Intel. It always was a solid suite of products. Now that it is part of Avocent, its promise as a hybrid of network and security policy management is being realized. The notion of managing the desktop and evolving that into security policy management makes a lot of sense.

The views of the visionary I spoke with from this veteran anti-malware company took the conversation in directions I had not expected. He started out by asking, "Why, if I have done everything I can to secure my enterprise, is my data still being compromised?"

Our last category this year is the one that ties everything together: security infrastructure. Here we are talking about those things that support all of the other bits and pieces of security architecture. Just like network infrastructure, security is, essentially, the platform on which everything else rests.