The winners of the Sysadmin of the Year contest were announced this morning. Do you ever hug your system administrator, or do you go to him or her just when you have something to complain about? Well, if your sysadmin is an extraordinary figure, you may have a chance to show your appreciation in a future contest, because it seems this contest has satisfied the expectations of the key sponsor, Splunk.

I profiled Splunk earlier this year, praising their contemporary approach to solving system admiinistration problems by linking and providing data mining tools for large quantities of data, and for incorporating end-user feedback into the solution sets. Although this contest gained them some new potential marketing contacts, it was a contribution to the field, endorsed by a wide range of companies you can find on the contest’s home page.

Winners included an administrator who stayed in a burning building long enough to rescue his company’s data (thus saving not only the business but the key information of their customers), someone so popular at his web hosting service that 700 individuals submitted separate endorsements, and other worthy professionals.