CEO Steve Mullaney and marketing director Chris King accept the Best of Interop award for Palo Alto Networks Photo by Kim Kulish

With tech at the center of the last economic downturn, we're all holding our collective breath waiting to see how this one will affect IT budgets and the flow of innovative technology from vendors. The Best of Interop awards are one bellwether of the latter. The 181 entries related to the annual business technology event came in just under last year's 194 but marked an increase over 141 entries in 2006. Contenders included a mix of startups and heavyweights. InformationWeek editors picked winners in three overall categories--Best of Interop, Best Startup, and Best Green Vendor--and in eight tech categories.

The awards strive to identify technologies that will not only change how IT professionals work but also will reshape the day-to-day lives of businesses and end users. This year, top honor goes to a product that has the potential to do all that: the PA-4000 Series Next Generation Firewall from Palo Alto Networks.

The PA-4000, which also wins in the Security category, is a firewall that can identify and monitor traffic from more than 600 applications, enabling IT to allow, block, or restrict access to those apps across a company's network. Its purpose-built processor lets the PA-4000 sort and apply company policies to every application a user might have, without significantly slowing network performance. It also lets companies set policies on particular categories of apps, such as video or instant messaging, and control user access to new and emerging apps in those categories, even if IT isn't aware of them.

The PA-4000 has the potential to let companies stop having to say no to broad types of traffic, such as HTML. Instead, they can control access to specific applications, according to the needs of the business. Employees can be allowed to use an application in off hours but not during work hours, or one department can be allowed to use one application but not another.

The PA-4000 lets the business set policies on how employees, customers, and partners use IT resources--and enforce them with a real "gate" that prevents abuse. It also lets companies see how applications are used within the enterprise to better gauge productivity and efficiency in the IT infrastructure and at users' desktops.