100 Most Influential People in IT

51. Michal Zalewski
Information security engineer, Google
Before joining the search company, Zalewski launched an all-out assault on the security models of modern Web browsers, exposing critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox. His public disclosure of those flaws went a long way toward hardening the browsers.

52. David Barnes
CIO, United Parcel Service
Barnes is getting real efficient with the UPS fleet.

53. John Pescatore
Vice president and research fellow, Gartner
In many ways, Pescatore’s work determines enterprise spending at a very high level, influencing the delivery of Internet-facing products.

54. Robert Samson
Vice president, Worldwide Systems Sales, Systems and Technology Group, IBM
Samson is responsible for worldwide sales of IBM’s servers and storage products, as well as retail store solutions.

55. Faisal Hoque
Founder, Business Technology Management Institute
Hoque champions a form of management science called Business Technology Management, which aims to ensure that sustainable business value can be delivered through technology.

56. Bob Willett
CIO and CEO, Best Buy and Best Buy International
Willett is a forerunner of what we call “the hollowing of big IT”—where IT organizations of the future will be composed of managers and analysts with most specialty work outsourced.

57. Jimmy Wales
Founder, Wikia
Co-founder of that fount of shared knowledge, Wikipedia, Wales is now looking to apply the wiki model to search with Wikia Search.

58. Bruce Schneier
CTO, BT Counterpane

Schneier is a leading cryptology expert and a voice for common sense in security policy.

59. Charles Phillips
President, Oracle
Larry Ellison makes the plans, and Phillips has to fuse his boss’ big thoughts with reality.

60. Stefan Esser
Security researcher
Esser’s “Month of PHP Bugs” project thoroughly exposed the insecure nature of the widely deployed PHP language and forced a rethink of security in the open-source world.

61. Martin Roesch
CTO, Sourcefire
The inventor of the open-source Snort, Roesch is a noted expert in the area of intrusion prevention technology.

62. Ann Livermore
Executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett-Packard
Livermore has tremendous influence over the types of products HP offers its enterprise customers, as well as the small and midsize companies HP has begun to pursue.

63. John Doerr
Venture capitalist, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
In tech, it’s all about making the right venture capital bets.

64. Angela Merkel
Chancellor, Germany

The first female chancellor of Germany, Merkel is a physicist by training and has the strongest understanding of technology of any world leader.

65. Ravi Marwaha
General manager, IBM Global Business Partners
The partner program Marwaha oversees actively networks with solution providers from different disciplines to develop innovative solutions that solve real-world customer problems.

66. John Glaser
CIO, Partners HealthCare
Leader in the strategic application of IT in the health care industry.

67. Bill Hilf
Director of platform strategy, Microsoft
Hilf is a key player in Microsoft’s evolving strategy to reach out to the open-source community.

68. Mark Shuttleworth
CEO, Canonical
The leader of the Ubuntu distribution is mainstreaming Linux on the desktop.

69. Randy Mott
CIO, Hewlett-Packard

Formerly CIO at Wal-Mart and Dell, Mott is responsible for HP’s IT strategy and assets.

70. Thomas Davenport
Author
“Competing on Analytics” is an important book at a time when business intelligence is in its ascendancy.

71. Gary Hamel
Author
His ideas in “The Future of Management” validate and expound new ways of working and using IT.

72. Simon Crosby
CTO, XenSource
Crosby is a leading proponent of open-source virtualization with the Xen hypervisor. (XenSource was acquired by Citrix in 2007.)

73. Edward Markey
U.S. Representative, D-Mass.
Markey serves as the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunication and the Internet, and is a major advocate for net neutrality.

74. Ross Mayfield
Co-founder, SocialText

As SocialText’s chairman and president, and former CEO, Mayfield is a thought leader in the burgeoning Web 2.0 collaboration software market.

75. Stan Shih
Chairman, Acer
Shih started Acer—which snapped up Gateway in 2007—and is still the company’s top tech visionary.