None of the results would have hit these pages, however, without the invaluable expertise and assistance of our top-notch research staff: Judy Boardman, Katy Hoffmann, Courtenay Kelley, Mona R. Litt, Nathalie Mendoza and Debbie Rizzo. Special thanks also go out to our copy and production staffs for their incomparable and unerring hard work and good judgment.

All of the products highlighted here--winners and honorable mentions alike--are champions. Each in its own way has taken networking to new, more polished levels. The effort the vendors have made to perfect their products pays off every day in networks and enterprise systems. We know how vital these products are to network managers across America--we've worked with each of them in our Real-World Labs® in the same nitty-gritty way corporate network managers work with them. Deciding which products merit our most esteemed awards--Best Hardware and Software Products of 1998--generated lively debate among our editors, but in the end, two products stood out. Taking top honors as this year's Best Hardware and Software Products are 3Com Corp.'s CoreBuilder 3500 and Tivoli Systems' TME 10 NetView 5.0, respectively.

Our two products of the year demonstrate the continuing maturation of our industry. CoreBuilder 3500 epitomizes the direction that high-performance infrastructure is taking. Layer 3 switching addresses some of the most profound issues we've faced as network designers over the past few years, giving us more bandwidth and ending the switch versus route debate. Our software product of the year, Tivoli's TME 10 NetView is exactly the sort of product that's up the task. Not so many months ago, network management was the realm of large Unix workstations. Shelling out $100,000 for software and hardware was only the beginning. Windows NT-based systems with just as much muscle as the Unix products have made network management affordable for a whole range of customers whose needs are just as critical. Tivoli is leading that drive with TME 10, a powerful, intuitive and useful network and systems management tool for mission-critical networks.