10 Techies in the Shadows

Rosenblum’s wife, VMware president and CEO Diane Greene, gets most of the attention, but Rosenblum has been the one steering the development of the company’s jewel-

Dave Duffield-

Seen occasionally doing the West Coast side of bicoastal events in tandem with Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, Harris is an English major who understands enough about business and technology to have been perhaps the least-known driving force behind the software-as-a-service industry.

The name most associated with the OLPC project is founder Nicholas Negroponte’s. And the goal of the project-

When you think Linux, you think Linus (as in Torvalds). But Ts’o is a top-level Linux kernel developer whose accomplishments are renowned in the open-source community: He was the first North American kernel developer, and, in August 1991, he set up the first FTP service between Finland and the United States.
His more recent work includes being the chair of the IP Security working group for the Internet Engineering Task Force, the standards body for the Internet; creator and organizer of the Annual Linux Kernel Summit; and technical lead for the MIT Kerberos 5 development team. He also won the 2006 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, which is bestowed by the Free Software Foundation.

Smarr is Plaxo’s first employee and the technical lead for Plaxo’s developer platform. He is also lead engineer for Pulse, the company’s social aggregation initiative, designed to compete with Facebook and LinkedIn, among others.
Smarr also is one of the main authors of the Bill of Rights for the Open Social Web and Plaxo’s representative for the DataPortability WorkGroup, which is hashing out guidelines to allow data to be safely shared across applications and social networks.

DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework for Solaris, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, and is likely headed for Linux and other operating systems in the future. It allows people to look inside running software and work out problems while the program executes. What this means is that DTrace allows enterprise software to be far better tuned and debugged because both system administrators and developers can inspect the running code. DTrace could be a game changer for enterprise software, once it gets onto more platforms.

As the Microdrive business line manager of the IBM Storage Technology Division, Kuptz headed up the group that came up with the basics of the drive on which the iPod is based. Kuptz has been known to refer to himself, somewhat facetiously, as the “father of the iPod.”

McCall founded Azaleos-

Meyer is considered by many to be the most likely successor to Hector Ruiz, AMD’s current CEO. Meyer has been with AMD since 1995 and started his career by leading the engineering team that eventually produced the AMD Athlon processor. Before AMD, Meyer worked at Digital Equipment.