The Top 50 Innovators

Innovation is a critical lifeblood to solution providers. It not only infuses the channel with compelling new products to sell, but also fuels VARs with the platforms on which to do what they do best: innovate. It's a cause-and-effect phenomenon: Technology vendors invent new products that push the IT envelope, and then VARs go to the next level, concocting unique, creative solutions that elevate the pieces into something bigger.

Thus, the importance of true innovators cannot be understated. Behind every disruptive technology, every performance breakthrough, every Web-caliber paradigm shift is a human being or group of people who made the achievement possible. Innovation really isn't about things so much as it is about those individuals--agile technology thinkers who revel in tackling problems, who see opportunity where others do not, who lay claim to all those patents for all those gizmos.

Here at VARBusiness, we want to honor those individuals. And what better place than in our second annual Technology Innovators issue, which, for the first time, features a list of Top 50 technology innovators in the industry. These individuals represent some of the best and brightest men and women in the industry--top minds that exemplify technological creativity coupled with keen business acumen. These are the people who aren't all about the lab, but have proved how to move innovation out of the research halls and into the hands of solution providers who build on their successes.

We are talking about people like Ray Ozzie, co-founder and CEO of Groove Networks, and one of the original inventors of the Lotus Notes messaging platform. And Linus Torvalds, whose vision for egalitarian software has furnished us with Linux and put open source on the mainstream map. Or someone like Dirk Meyer, whose pioneering semiconductor work has kept AMD's David competitive with Intel's Goliath in the fast-growing 64-bit computing market.

Combined, our list of innovators racks up an astounding number of years' worth of experience in the industry and hundreds of technology patents. Many of our honorees work for IT's leading corporate giants, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Still, others have earned their reputations at smaller companies, like JBoss, where CEO Mark Fleury is architecting commercial success from a fledgling open-source application server and taking the channel along with him, or at Iona, where CTO Eric Newcomer has been a driving force for the development of today's Web services standards.

Partners have a great opportunity to improve on the achievements of such innovators, and it pays to align yourselves with cutting-edge technology providers so that you are ahead of the curve. Ask Groove's Ozzie. A visionary in the area of collaborative technologies, his recent work has been heralded for enabling smaller companies to gain the benefits of a Notes- or Microsoft Exchange-type messaging solution without the inherent complexity and cost. Ozzie says that true innovation, while still happening inside big companies, is happening after the products leave the barn.

"If you go back to Lotus Notes, some of the most interesting and pioneering things done with the technology were not done by Lotus, but by customers and VARs who were close to the business problem at hand," he says. "It's an innovative platform, but there was a lot to build that was domain-specific."

So, how do major technology companies stay focused on innovation? It's not easy, particularly during a down economy when nurturing a legacy product line is critical to a business' ongoing financial health. But the successful vendors maintain their commitments to R&D, and that's reflected in the types of CTOs and technology engineers they hire.

"I do think it's a real challenge in maintaining and incubating innovation while continuing to drive the base," says Allison Watson, vice president of worldwide partner sales and marketing at Microsoft, whose CTO, Craig Mundie, made our top 50 list. "I think [Microsoft] does a fairly amazing job of product innovation by putting small teams together that get to focus on a very specific product or ones where their whole job is to think about innovation. It's like setting up a company within a company."

It's also critical to tie innovation to what it will ultimately offer in terms of partner opportunity, says Scott Kriens, CEO of Juniper Networks, where CTO Pradeep Sindhu made our list of innovators this year. "When we look at what our reseller and distribution strategy should be, the innovation part is figuring out how our partners can make money, as opposed to, 'How do we make money?'" Kriens says.

The exciting news is that innovation is alive, well and prospering in the hands of these able technology visionaries. There are plenty of untapped reservoirs, from wireless technologies to smart phones to the untold opportunities created by the ubiquity of extremely large storage devices. Just consider what possibilities arise from widespread availability of a terabyte hard drive, something not so far off, according to Groove's Ozzie.

In choosing this year's top innovators, we strove to include engineers from all technology walks of life, from enterprise networking to application development, from wireless to storage, from servers to business software. We scoured the applicants' biographies, patents and inventions, and past experience. We considered the impact their current firm has had on the overall technology market and weighed the person's ability to bridge both the worlds of technical development and business achievement. It's an impressive group. It should be noted that the list is not a ranking; the ordering of names is purely alphabetical. Enjoy, and congratulations to all of VARBusiness' choices for the Top 50 technology innovators in 2004.

Marilyn O'Hara, Tanzina Vega and Ellen Lazarus contributed to this article.