Awards blow

I don't usually comment on these things because I don't really think much of awards. I felt the need to post this simply to prove my point.

SC Magazine recently announced the winners of their annual SC Magazine awards. First thing I noticed was the following:

Best Identity Management Solution

Winner:
Encentuate for Encentuate TCI

Finalists:
BMC Software for BMC Identity Management
Courion Corporation for Courion’s Enterprise Provisioning Suite
Novell for Novell Identity Manager and Access Manager
Oracle Corporation for Oracle Identity Management

I noticed the glaring omissions of CA, IBM and Sun...right after my "What the F*$&" reaction at the decision they made with regards to the winner. I mean really...Encentuate?! How does having some single sign on and access control stuff qualify them as winners over the other finalists?

Even though I thought they made a rather "interesting" decision with their Identity Management award, I thought I should at least give them credit for having the good sense to appear impartial by omitting CA from that Identity Management list (CA is a platinum sponsor as you can see on this page)...and then I saw this:

Best Enterprise Security Solution

Winner:
CA for CA Identity and Access Management Suite, including CA SiteMinder

Finalists:
Guidance Software for EnCase Enterprise
PGP Corporation for PGP Encryption Platform
Vontu for Vontu 6.0

At this point, any shred of credibility they had left in my eyes was lost completely. Again, I had to say "What the F*$&" with their list of finalists. Did they pick the list with the intent that they would have no choice but to give it to CA because the others obviously did not measure up?

I'd really like to see what set of criteria they used to come up with the list of finalists and to pick the eventual winner. Did they toss a coin? Use a roulette wheel? Roll a dice?