[Updated Apr. 7. 2005] — Several Linux-oriented companies have made Gartner's annual list of “cool vendors” in the application development market. Gartner's list highlights vendors with innovative, commercially relevant products, and this year included Linux distributor Wind River, “developer testing” proponent Agitar, and distributed collaboration specialist VA Software.

Wind River made the list because it “caused a disruption” in the embedded market, according to Gartner, with end-to-end device networking software that elevated competitive differentiation higher up the stack. The company also brought out its first device software stack based on Linux, the Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition.

Agitar made the list because it “made the idea of developers creating testable code cool,” according to Gartner. Agitar sells Eclipse plug-ins for testing and code validation, and is an early and visible proponent of developer testing — a trendy practice in which programmers validate their own code as they write it.

VA Software made the list because of its “early response to the need for tools enabling globally distributed AD (application development),” Gartner says. VA's SourceForge tools are used by myriad open source projects, and the company also offers development tools aimed at enterprise developers.

Additional companies named by Gartner in 2005 include Identify Software, iRise, and Sofea. In 2004, Gartner's list of cool companies included embedded platform virtualization company DoubleWide Software, which makes software that can emulate custom embedded hardware, thereby enabling embedded developers to get started working before samples of custom boards have become available.

 
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