We learned today that Requirements.net consortium member Blueprint has announced that its solution for requirements definition and visualization was honored as a finalist in the “Best Software Development Solution” category for the 2010 CODiE awards.

On the surface, this could be regarded as “just another good software company winning just another industry award.” However, it’s more significant than that.First off, the CODiE awards are a big deal. More than 785 individual software solutions were evaluated through an extensive review process. The evaluation was performed by industry leading subject matter experts, analysts, journalists, and other IT professionals. These evaluation were hands-on, meaning that all of the considered solutions were independently tested.

Of these, only three vendors were named finalists in the “Best Software Development Solution” category.What’s significant here is that over the past 10 years, no business analyst/requirements definition focused vendor of any kind has ever been recognized. The winners have always been development or test-centric platforms and tools. Past winners in the CODiE “Best Software Development Solution” category have included: Borland development products, BEA development products, Infragistics NetAdvantage, Host Front from Seagull, IBM Rational IDE products, and NetBeans 4.1 from Sun Microsystems, etc.Of course, Blueprint is focused squarely on the business analyst. Being named a finalist in this category is not simply an honor for a single company, but rather a recognition that the role of the business analyst has become fully integral to software development success.Business analyst empowerment has become the next major area of SDLC optimization, and is dramatically more important today than just a few short years ago. As IT projects become more complex — and the integration between silos of application software become the paramount goal within the Global 2000 — ensuring requirements are right is a strategic beachhead for business and IT alignment.So to all of the business analysts out there, congratulations!

Read more about the recognition here.