The suspense is over, and 20 companies are celebrating their successes in this year’s Software Satisfaction Awards, which were handed out at a glitzy ceremony in London on Thursday night.

“This is the third annual Software Satisfaction Awards dinner – and I’m really proud to see that we have created an annual gathering where the industry can come together as one to celebrate its collective achievements,” Sift Media’s technology editor John Stokdyk told the 300+ audience.

The mid-range software award went to Octopus, which left Chris Beaumont, sales director at the company, feeling extremely proud: “We’ve had three years of incredibly hard work, as far as the organisation is concerned,” he said. “All of our team has worked very hard in terms of maintaining a high level of customer service. We have a fantastic range of clients that have been brilliant in supporting us, so as a company, it is a great achievement.”

Octopus is designed completley as a software-as-a-service model. “It’s all about self service – companies want employees and managers to get their hands on it. We’ve got one central solution and the .NET architecture enabled us to do that,” added Geoff Burch, founder of Octopus.

In the payroll category, last year’s winners, Moneysoft’s Payroll Manager, scooped the award for the second year running.

Meanwhile, SuccessFactors won in the talent management category, having improved on their honourable mention last year. “At SuccessFactors, we have an unrelenting focus on customer satisfaction, so for people to come back and say that we deserve this award really means a lot to us,” said Andy Leaver, vice president of sales EMEA at the company, who also revealed the secret to keeping software customers satisfied:

“We have got an absolute fastidious focus on customer success – that is what all of our people care about, that is what we do. At the end of the day, if they don’t come back, we are not going to be successful.”

More than 5,600 people participated in this year’s Software Satisfaction survey covering 19 categories of accounting & finance, HR & training, and customer management applications. This is more than double the amount of votes collated last year.

The full list of winners in the HR & training categories are as follows:

Mid-range software – Octopus

Enterprise software – Softscape Apex

Payroll software – Payroll Manager from Moneysoft

Talent management software – SuccessFactors’ ULTRA

Learning management systems – Raptivity from Harbinger Knowledge Products

Congratulations to all prize winners. A brochure setting out the results in each category is available from the Software Satisfaction Awards website.