For 20 years we have honored the best in networking through our annual User Excellence Award. But the innovation of our past winners didn't stop the day they received their crystal statuettes. Many have gone on to extract more benefits from the projects that gained them User Excellence recognition. Others have set their sights on new projects that will boost user productivity, cut costs, increase security or make their companies more competitive. We take a look.

Ed Mann and Bob Piccirillo
Vice presidents of IS
Prudential Financial, Newark, N.J.

Ed Mann (right) and Bob Piccirillo (left) won the 2001 User Excellence Award. At the time, Mann was vice president of network planning and Piccirillo, vice president of field infrastructure. Piccirillo also earned honorable mention in our 1998 competition for a network overhaul he oversaw while vice president of field technology at Prudential Insurance.

Mann and Piccirillo had their hands full in 2001 as they headed up what was deemed one of the nation's largest VPN projects, a network for connecting Prudential Financial's 25,000 telecommuting employees and business partners. Not ones to rest on their laurels, the duo is still tweaking the company's remote-access network. Top of the list has been a complete refresh of 6,000 employee laptops nationwide to Windows XP.

"The old machines were starting to have high maintenance, and there was a lot of breakage," Piccirillo says. "Users had to mail them into a depot to be exchanged for a similar model. After three years, it was definitely time for an upgrade."

The IT team developed its own file transfer, and another tool used made sure the company's proprietary agent system could interoperate with XP, which is now the companywide standard platform. The team carried out the migration in two months. "The laptops are now being used in a more secure way - we are able to enforce that they have proper anti-virus software and firewalls," Mann says. "Otherwise they get blocked from the network."

With the migration project complete in February 2004, the team turned to other challenges: the variety of ways in which users want to access corporate data. Although Mann could not name the tools the company is using, he says Prudential has data security programs in place.