At the end of last month, we announced that Layer 7 had been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 growth company and had been positioned as a leader in Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies. Today, we’re very proud to announce that Forrester Research, Inc. has named Layer 7 a Leader in a new report, The Forrester Wave™: SOA Application Gateways, Q4 2011.

The report groups its criteria into three high-level categories: Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence. Layer 7’s “SecureSpan SOA Gateway scored well in all of the major functional categories.” In fact, we actually had the highest score in the Current Offering category and the Strategy category. As a Leader, we were recognized for our broad and deep support for messaging styles, attack protection, trust enablement and content transformation.

Top vendors were evaluated, so we feel it’s a great honor to be positioned as a Leader in this SOA Application Gateways Wave. For more information on the report, read our press release.

More exciting news! You may recall we recently announced that Layer 7 had been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 growth company. Well, now we’re very pleased to inform you that Layer 7 has been positioned as a leader in Gartner’s 2011 Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies. The Magic Quadrant is an influential research report that presents a global view of Gartner’s opinion on the main vendors in the SOA governance space.

According to Gartner: “All vendors considered in this Magic Quadrant have articulated a cloud strategy, and have provided evidence that they have started to execute it.” Notably, the report also states that “SOA governance in the cloud also overlaps consistently with API management, the combination of services enabling organizations to deploy, intermediate, govern, catalog and secure public Web APIs based on Web-oriented architecture (WOA) principles, mainly for the use of mobile applications.” The expansion of SOA technologies and governance models across the Web and into the Cloud is central to Layer 7’s business model, as we continue to develop best-of-breed solutions for SOA governance, API management and Cloud integration.

And here’s some more good news. We are offering our blog readers complimentary access to this valuable research report. Simply click here to register for access to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SOA Governance Technologies 2011. For more information on the Magic Quadrant and Layer 7’s inclusion in the report, you can read our press release.

Exciting news: Layer 7 Technologies has just been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 growth company for 2011. Deloitte ranked us as the 71st fastest-growing tech company in all of North America (we were also number 15 on the Fast 50 for Canada).

Unlike many other awards, the Deloitte Fast 500 takes actual growth numbers into consideration. It’s not enough to simply tell them you’re doing well; they actually need audited proof! Definitely a nice recognition for our hard work and rapid growth over the last few years.

Here’s the announcement:

LAYER 7 TECHNOLOGIES NAMED TO DELOITTE’S 2011 TECHNOLOGY FAST 500

Layer 7 Named 71st Fastest-Growing Technology Company in North America

VANCOUVER, BC, October 19, 2011—Layer 7 Technologies, the leader in security and connectivity solutions for Internet-facing integrations across departments, partners, Cloud and mobile, today announced that it has been ranked number 71 on the Technology Fast 500, Deloitte’s ranking of 500 of the fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. Winners were selected based upon their percentage of revenue growth over the five-year period between 2006 and 2011.

“Layer 7 Technologies and all the Technology Fast 500 winners in 2011 have shown a remarkable drive for creativity and innovation, and of course growth, particularly when you look at their accomplishments in the context of current economic challenges,” said Richard Lee, national leader, Technology Media & Telecommunications Industry Group, Deloitte Canada. “Deloitte congratulates Layer 7 on this significant achievement.”

Layer 7’s growth is due largely to the explosion of information sharing in the Cloud and with external partners and integration of mobile devices into the enterprise. As mobile and Cloud initiatives drive enterprises to expose data and applications to the outside world, Layer 7’s  industry-leading line of Gateways to secure and govern integrations that span the Internet becomes more and more critical.

“Making the annual Deloitte Fast 500 list is an exciting moment for the company,” said Paul Rochester, CEO of Layer 7 Technologies. “As more public and private institutions embrace the cost-effectiveness and convenience of the Cloud, tablets and smart phones, the need for streamlined secure application connectivity solutions will continue to grow and we expect our business to continue its upward trajectory.”

For additional detail on the Technology Fast 500, including selection and qualifying criteria, visit www.fast500.com.

As a company, we’ve always been about enabling secure real-time integration over the Internet. I suspect that the next few years will see a double derivative gain in demand for our kind of technology, as mobile and Cloud integration become dominant adoption drivers for the enterprise. As a new 4S owner, I like to think I did my small part.