NEC Solutions (America), Inc., a leading provider of business solutions and services for the high-end commercial and professional markets in North America, announced today that the company's continuous availability fault tolerant server - the NEC Express5800/320Lb - was named a Finalist by the editors of Windows & .NET Magazine in the Best of Show Awards competition at Tech Ed 2003. The field of award nominees, which was judged by technical editors from the magazine, included more than 211 entries in 7 categories. "The field included over 200 entries and the selection process was rigorous. We chose finalists based on the product's strategic importance to the market and its competitive advantages and the value to the customer," said Mike Otey, Senior Technical Editor for Windows & .NET Magazine. The Finalist Award nomination follows the March 2003 launch of the NEC Express5800/320Lb, the company's second-generation continuous availability, fault tolerant server. The NEC Express5800/320Lb server is designed with redundant hardware components to prevent hardware failures that cause system outages and downtime. This generation of server provides users with a small, rack mount form factor and redundant 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon(R) processors, which bring the server into data-intensive applications such as transaction processing, telecommunications and large-scale security environments. The Best of Show Awards are designed to help IT and network managers shorten the evaluation process in assessing new products. As one of many prestigious industry awards received by NEC Solutions' fault tolerant server series, the Tech Ed Best of Show Finalist Award also validates the rapid adoption of the company's continuous availability servers by leading IT executives.