Cisco Systems and Ericsson each went home with three trophies in Telecom Asia's 3rd Readers' Choice Awards while Huawei Technologiesand Amdocs won two awards each.
Twenty-one equipment and software suppliers received 27 awards, which were presented on December 9 at a ceremony in Hong Kong by representatives from 15 service providers.
Executives from AT&T, BT, C&W Worldwide, China Telecom, China Unicom, CSL, Global Crossings, Hong Kong Broadband Network, Hutchison Telecom, NTT Com Asia, Orange Business Services, SmartTone-Vodafone, Telecom Malaysia, Telstra International and Verizon Business were on hand to celebrate with the winners.
Cisco was named the Best Network Infrastructure Provider of the Year - the overall best vendor award - as well as the Core Network Vendor of the Year and Carrier Ethernet Vendor of the Year.
The Wireless Network Vendor of the Year, Best Infrastructure Management Vendor and Video Platform Vendor of the Year awards went to Ericsson. Huawei Technologies was recognized as the FTTx Vendor of the Year and Wireless Broadband Network Vendor of the Year.
For the second straight year, Amdocs won the BSS Vendor of the Year award and was honored with a Special Editor Recognition Award for the Most Innovative Vendor of the Year. Telecom Asia's editors, which presented three Special Editor awards, selected Amdocs for its newly introduced real-time data analysis and decision-making platform.
Openwave Systems won Best Network Management and Optimization Solution for is Media Optimizer, which allows operators to analyze and implement network optimization based on real-time conditions.
The third Special Editor Recognition prize - BSS Best Practices - went to Intec for the second time for its solutions that help operators reduce capex and opex by running on carrier-grade, low-cost commodity hardware.
Winning awards for the second year running were also Ceragon Networks (Microwave Backhaul), IBM (Cloud), Juniper Networks (Metro Networks), Nokia Siemens Networks (Best Managed Support Services) and ZTE (Broadband).
First-time winners this year included Andrew (In-Building), Ciena (Optical Networks), HP (SDP), Microsoft (Unified Communication), NEC (Femtocell), Openwave, Samsung (Wimax), SAP (BI), VNL (Green Infrastructure). Genband, which acquired Nortel's carrier VoIP assets, won the Carrier VoIP Vendor of the Year award.
This year's awards program was expanded from 22 to 27 categories to better cover the breadth of the ever-expanding telecom landscape.
The Readers' Choice Awards are held annually to recognize the technology innovations and accomplishments of the top telecom vendors operating in Asia Pacific. Telecom Asia's users/reader base voted for the best vendors in 24 categories from a shortlist determined by nominations from analysts, consultants and senior telco executives. Telecom Asia's editorial team reviewed the nominations and consulted with a team analysts to create the shortlist and opened up voting in October.