Gary Bloom, Veritas Software

What it means: Since joining Veritas in November of 2000, CEO Gary Bloom has brought some of Oracle's marketing culture to what is now the eighth-largest, independent software company in the world. The company has plenty of cash in its reserve account, enough to put on some savvy marketing events at a time when most companies are cutting back in this area. Now, Bloom wants to make Veritas a $5 billion company. And one of the tactics he is using is to deliver products and form partnerships to push the company's software intelligence deeper into the network fabric. Veritas also is working to take multiple point products and weave them into a more cohesive software structure through its Adaptive Software Architecture.

VARBusiness' View: No doubt, Veritas is in a healthy position. Sales last year, after all, jumped 24 percent. But most people still don't understand what the company does, or more importantly, what it doesn't do. That includes industry insiders. Storage software has become an attractive industry in recent months, and one of Veritas' main challenges is that it has to fend off the flocks of companies that have set their sites on this once relatively ignored market. The good news for Veritas: Bloom learned most of his marketing skills from the master of spin, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. He'll need to use those skills to get customers to think of Veritas as more than just a backup-and-restore company. And the current message won't do that.

Joseph Tucci, EMC
Sanjay Kumar, Computer Associates
John Thompson, Symantec
Alfred Chuang, BEA Systems
Larry Ellison, Oracle