We received an exciting piece of news that brightened a cold winter day when snow was in the forecast: The Altova MissionKit has been selected as a finalist for the 2009 Jolt Award in the Development Environment category. And it gets even better: Altova DatabaseSpy as a standalone application has also been selected as a Jolt Award finalist in the Database Engines and Data Tools category. The 19th Annual Jolt Award winners will be announced at the SD West Conference in Santa Clara, CA in March, 2009. The Jolt Awards are designed to “recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead of the curve products,” according to Dr. Dobb’s, the award sponsor. Even before the winners are announced, it’s an honor to be selected as a Jolt Award finalist, since the judges select five finalists in each category from the literally hundreds of development tools and apps available in today’s fast-moving marketplace. The judges are all noted software industry leaders with experience across a wide range of development technologies and projects. We’re pleased that Altova continues to be recognized in such acclaimed company. XMLSpy was a 2003 Jolt Award winner in the Languages and Development Environments category, MapForce was a 2004 Jolt Award winner in the Business Integration and Data Tools category, and UModel was a 2006 Jolt Award finalist in the Design Tools and Modeling category. You can see the entire list of this year’s Jolt finalists at http://www.joltawards.com/finalists.html.