Two CHEN PR Clients Snag Wall Street Journal Innovation Awards

Kudos to two CHEN PR clients – Phase Forward and Palo Alto Networks – for earning 2008 Technology Innovation Awards from the Wall Street Journal. It's quite an accomplishment, given that the Journal received more than 700 entries, and recognized just 32 organizations across 16 categories.

A CHEN client since 2006, Phase Forward brings technology to the pharmaceutical industry, helping its customers automate global clinical trials (a $50B per year market) and shed inefficient paper-based methods – yes, paper – and as a result deliver better, safer drugs to market. The Wall Street Journal award honors its industry-changing work with GlaxoSmithKline in the Health-Care IT category. Several public companies serve this market, but only Phase Forward has posted 16 consecutive quarters of revenue growth since its 2004 IPO and counts 18 of the top 20 pharmaceutical firms as customers. This award is just the most recent in a long string of accolades including the Boston Business Journal naming safety group President Chan Russell a 2008 Champion in Healthcare.

Next-gen firewall provider and CHEN client since 2007, Palo Alto took the runner-up spot in the hotly contested Network Security category (a shout out to our Waltham, MA-based neighbor Veracode for taking the trophy for its on-demand application testing solution.)

With a rock star team that includes father of the firewall, Founder and CTO Nir Zuk, President and CEO Lane Bess and VP of Marketing Steve Mullaney, Palo Alto is redefining its category – populated by behemoths like Cisco, Juniper and Check Point – by bringing much-needed application visibility and control to one of the biggest-dollar sectors in network security. The nod from the WSJ adds to Palo Alto’s recognition, which includes earning the Grand Prize Winner at Interop in May.

All that and they're pretty funny, too -- check them out on YouTube, but only if your firewall allows.

Congrats!