The Top 100 Most Influential People in IT

By eWEEK

1. Larry Ellison
CEO, Oracle

Ellison’s plans to roll up the enterprise applications space show no signs of slowing. Oracle has leveraged its strength in the data center to cement its status as one of the world’s most important applications and middleware vendors. For more on Ellison’s influence, click here.

2. Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple

Apple’s influence is being increasingly felt in the enterprise.

3. Steve Ballmer
CEO, Microsoft

Microsoft has certainly seen its challenges of late, with a poorly received Windows Vista and European Commission woes. But, as Microsoft goes, so goes the industry still-

4. Sam Palmisano
Chairman and CEO, IBM

Quietly and without fanfare, Palmisano has positioned IBM to generate great returns in a mature market by expanding internationally and wherever he’s seen opportunity in the enterprise apps space.

5. Marissa Mayer
Vice president, search products and user experience, Google

In addition to overseeing the way search is constructed and rendered usable for millions of people all over the world, Mayer is shepherding the company’s health portal initiative.

6. Jean-Philippe Courtois
President, Microsoft International, Microsoft

Courtois leads global sales, marketing and services for Microsoft International, in more than 240 countries outside the United States and Canada. His role is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft sales outside North America increase.

7. Joe Tucci
Chairman, president and CEO, EMC

Tucci is taking EMC on a trip beyond storage.

8. Mark Hurd
Chairman, president and CEO, Hewlett-Packard

With $100 billion in revenue in 2007, Hewlett-Packard is now one of the largest tech companies, and Hurd has worked to add to the company’s portfolio by expanding both its software division and its services portfolio.

9. John Chambers
Chairman and CEO, Cisco

IP is increasingly becoming the channel by which all communications travel, and Cisco is providing not only the plumbing but also the applications.

10. Larry Page & Sergey Brin
President of products and president of technology, respectively, Google

The founders of Google changed expectations for search engines, and now they’re doing the same with a growing suite of applications that have paved the way for a top-down model of technology implementation.

11. John Johnson
CIO, Intel

Johnson undertook one of the world’s largest mobile computing efforts: Some 85 percent of Intel employees are now free from their desktops, resulting in double-digit gains in productivity.

12. Kevin Turner
COO, Microsoft

The former Wal-Mart executive brings important logistical management experience to Microsoft. More importantly, Turner has succeeded as chief operating officer while other outsiders have floundered in the role.

13. Ray Ozzie
Chief software architect, Microsoft

Ozzie is transforming Microsoft from within. Outside Microsoft, he’s known as the person responsible for its forward-thinking services strategy. Within some quarters of Microsoft, he is known for building out the services vision and platform, while letting other executives take credit.

14. Marc Benioff
CEO, Salesforce.com

Benioff proclaimed the end of software, and he was right.

15. Linus Torvalds
Developer, Linux Foundation

Torvalds developed Linux, the poster child for open source and arguably the first open-source app widely used in the enterprise. And his influence on the Linux kernel continues to be felt on a day-to-day basis.

16. Jonathan Schwartz
President and CEO, Sun Microsystems

By hitching his company to open source, Schwartz is making sure the Sun doesn’t set.

17. Jeff Bezos
Chairman and CEO, Amazon.com

Bezos is constantly driving Amazon.com’s evolution from Web-based bookseller to uber-online retailer to cloud computing provider.

18. Michael Dell
CEO, Dell

Dell is back and ready to rumble in the enterprise space. In the year since his return leading the company that bears his name, Dell has re-adjusted the company in several ways, with more emphasis on storage and servers, and more emphasis on the channel rather than on direct sales and on business and government rather than the consumer space.

19. Barbara Desoer
CTO & COO, Bank of America

Banks, mortgages and acquisitions all come together in Desoer’s tech operations during a difficult economic time.

20. Diane Greene
President and CEO, VMware

Greene believed in virtualization when no one else did. Now she has to defend VMware’s turf as virtualization becomes the common wisdom.

21. Nandan Nilekani
Co-chairman, Infosys

In 2006, Nilekani was named by Time magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and by Forbes Asia as “Business Leader of the Year.” Nilekani has been instrumental in making India an IT force and is still coming on strong.

22. Mendel Rosenblum
Chief scientist, VMware

As co-founder and still chief scientist at VMware, Rosenblum has enormous influence over the development of the hypervisor and is working on new areas for the company to explore with virtualization.

23. Rob Carter
CIO, FedEx

Carter is widely considered to be the most innovative and effective CIO in the United States. His efforts in supply chain management and innovation have helped made FedEx one of the most interesting IT case studies around. He’s also one of those rare CIOs who truly has a seat at the table, and works closely with Fred Smith, FedEx’s founder/chairman/CEO.

24. Peter Weill
Director, Center for Information Systems Research

As the director and senior research scientist at CISR at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Weill conducts research on the role and value of IT in the enterprise.