Winning easily with 27 percent of the vote, Network Automation's (formerly Unisyn Software) AutoMate shut out last year's winner of the Best Automation/Scheduling Tool award, BMC Software's CONTROL-M for Microsoft Windows. Contention for second place in this contest was intense, with the competition between CONTROL-M and WM Software's ShutdownPlus Professional 6.0 resulting in a tie.

AutoMate software lets IT pros automate front- and back-office IT tasks. The solution categorizes common actions in visual steps. To build an AutoMate task, you use the Task Builder component to select from more than 130 available steps, ordering the steps as they need to execute. You can run tasks manually or set triggers (such as specific error prompts or event-log entries, CPU or disk usage thresholds) to automatically execute specific tasks. AutoMate tasks can interact with multiple applications, the Internet, and data simultaneously. Readers heaped praise on AutoMate, saying about the solution: "powerful, intuitive, and low-cost," "doesn't require programming knowledge," and "super-duper for 10 years."