100 Most Influential People in IT

76. Desh Deshpande
Founder, Deshpande Center, MIT School of Engineering
From financial flop to billionaire to a new way of developing tech startups.

77. Edward Amoroso
CISO, AT&T
The chief information security officer at AT&T, Amoroso is a pioneer of security in the cloud.

78. Padmasree Warrior
CTO, Cisco
Formerly of Motorola, Warrior plays a key role in the development of Cisco technology.

79. Mark Olsen
Chairman, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
Olsen and the PCAOB are charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with setting the standards for and enforcement of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

80. Mary Lou Jepsen
Founder, Pixel Qi
As CTO of the OLPC, Jepsen introduced innovative display technologies. Now she’s applying that experience at her Pixel Qi startup, which will build components for low-cost information devices.

81. Adeo Ressi
Founder, Thefunded.com
Ressi has built a huge following for his ratings of venture capitalists and his recounting of how they treat would-be entrepreneurs.

82. Bronwen Matthews
Security program manager, Microsoft
Matthews controls the budget for outside hacking teams hired to break Microsoft’s products.

83. Akash Saraf
CEO, Zenith InfoTech

Rather than setting up yet another boutique managed services offering, Saraf built a massive hosting infrastructure in India to deliver affordable managed services that resellers in the United States could brand as their own.

84. Chris Wysopal CTO, Veracode
Wysopal is a poster boy for hackers made good.

85. Lawrence Lessig
Founder, Center for Internet and Society
With his Change Congress Web site, Lessig’s goal is to reduce corruption and the influence of money in politics. Lessig is also an advocate for reduced legal restrictions on the radio spectrum and the creator of Creative Commons license.

86. Patricia Curley
CIO, The Kraft Group

Tasked with managing the technology that keeps the New England Patriots humming, Curley also oversees IT for the New England Revolution soccer team and Gillette Stadium.

87. Jim Collins
Author
“Good to Great” is the most popular and influential book among CIOs.

88. Edward Felten
Computer security and privacy and technology policy researcher, Princeton University

Felten is shining a spotlight on the intersection of public policy and privacy.

89. Evan Williams
Founder, Twitter
Williams asked the question, “What are you doing right now?” and changed the way we communicate in the process.

90. Matt Mullenweg
Co-founder, WordPress

The 24-year-old Mullenweg is a pioneer of the open-source blog.

91. Alan Kay
A computer science legend, Kay’s most recent work has been with the OLPC, whose XO laptop is based in part on his innovations.

92. Ivan Krstic
Former director of security, OLPC
Krstic, who left the OLPC in March, created the innovative Bitfrost security architecture for the XO. If Bitfrost proves itself on the XO, it will influence anti-malware security on mainstream operating systems.

93. Nicholas Carr
Author
Carr shook up the industry by saying that IT doesn’t matter. Agree or not, his ideas continue to shape the way that organizations look at the IT department.

94. Tavis Ormandy
Information security engineer, Google
Ormandy, one of the most visible hackers/researchers on the Google Security Team, faces the unenviable responsibility of making sure all of Google’s products pass the security smell test.

95. Mark Spencer
Chairman and CTO, Digium
Spencer founded Asterisk and the open-source telephony movement.

96. Dave Winer
Software developer and entrepreneur

Winer is the developer of RSS.

97. Thornton May
Florida Community College, IT Leadership Academy
May is a noted technology futurist.

98. William
Cheswick
Lead member of technical staff, AT&T Labs

Cheswick continues to innovate in the area of communications research.

99. Chris Anderson
Author
Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, proffered the notion of the niche in his book, “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.”

100. Ben Bernanke
Chairman, Federal Reserve Board
No one will have a bigger impact on the fate of the nation’s banks and financial services companies, interest rates, or access to credit.