By Morris Panner, CEO, OpenAir

The CODiE awards—a cross between American Idol and the Academy Awards—can change a company’s fate in a single night.

I should know.

Last year, we won the Best Business Software award at the CODiE awards in San Francisco. At the time, we were negotiating to sell our company to NetSuite, the world leader in on-demand ERP.

After we won last year, Zach Nelson, the NetSuite CEO, pinged me with the highest NetSuite accolade—“Suite!”

Two weeks later, NetSuite purchased our company and I continue to run the OpenAir division.

This year, I again attended the CODiEs, held last night at the elegant Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Also, having won last year, I MC’d some of the Software CODiE awards. Here are some of my experiences at the event , in a live-blogging format:

I am on the other side of the podium this year, giving out the awards. It’s a great honor.

Hundreds of people in black tie and ball gowns sit down for dinner. More than 1,100 companies have applied for 67 awards. 30 of these awards will go to software companies.

In the words of Ken Wasch, president of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), this is the only peer award of its type in the industry. The brand new vice president of the software division, Todd Gardner—an entrepreneur himself, having founded SaaS Capital before joining the SIIA—marvels at the entrepreneurial energy in the room.

The evening is punctuated by comedy (a stand-up comedian, named Wayne Cotter, who jokes about XML and self-executing code routines) and music (a band, improbably named Wonderbread 5, blares covers of songs from artists like the Jackson 5 and Neil Diamond).

Behind all the fun is the competition of emerging companies trying to make their mark.

Tonight, some of the big guys win awards—Adobe and Novell take home honors. But there are also some great underdog stories.

The world of innovation and entrepreneurship is small, so winners are friends—people I have worked with over the years. We have been each others’ customers and vendors—and even drinking buddies.

Here are a few of the inspirational stories tonight:

Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com), accepts the award for Best Online Business Service. Jim is a former Navy diver, who put himself through college on an ROTC scholarship, and served in Southeast Asia. Even in the bad economy, Jim thinks he can increase revenue 50 percent this year—maybe more.

Bill Soward, CEO of Adaptive Planning (www.adaptiveplanning.com), who has 25 years of experience in the industry, accepts the award for Best Business Intelligence Solution. He has partnered with Bob Hull, the founder of the company, to take on the giants and provide an online financial analysis solution.

John Girard, CEO of Clickability (www.clickability.com), accepted the award for the Best Content Management Solution. John drove the garage-based dream of four Stanford graduate students to create the most successful single-source provider of on-demand Web content management, powering sites like The Wall Street Journal and CNN Interactive.

Bob Moul, CEO of Boomi (www.boomi.com), accepted the award for the Best On-Demand Platform. Bob, who partnered with founder Rick Nucci, has been working hard to build data bridges in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) community through an integration engine. They have some of the SaaS leaders as clients, including NetSuite, Salesforce.com, Taleo, and Zuora.

It’s getting on toward midnight and Wonderbread 5 is kicking into gear.

We are celebrating the future.

Morris Panner is chief executive officer of OpenAir, a NetSuite company, which is a leading provider of on-demand professional services automation software. He was previously an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and spent a year fighting narco-terrorism in Bogotá, Columbia.  He is co-chair of the board of the Software Division of the SIIA and on the board of The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy group.