Technology Innovators: Top 50

Accenture
James Hall
Managing partner of the Accenture Technology, Alliance & Solutions service line

Top technology innovation in 2004:
% of products less than 2 years old:

Actuate
Nico Nierenberg
Chairman and chief architect
Nierenberg has been a software entrepreneur and innovator for more than 20 years. He founded Actuate in 1993 and served as CEO until August 2000. In his current role, Nierenberg guides Actuate's technology direction. Prior to Actuate, he co-founded Unify and was systems software chief for Rogers, Kirkham and Associates.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Initiated the open-source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project with the Eclipse Foundation. BIRT will result in the industry's first open-source BI and reporting platform by early 2005.
Amount Spent on R&D: Approximately $5 million per quarter--that's historically about 18% to 20% of revenue.

Altiris
Dwain Kinghorn
CTO
Kinghorn founded Computing Edge in 1994. He merged the company with Altiris in October 2000 and became CTO. Previously, Kinghorn served on the original three-person development team that created Microsoft's Systems Management Server. Computing Edge has been the leading provider of SMS add-on tools.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Natively integrating client, server and IT asset-management capabilities to enable true IT life-cycle management. The integrated functionality has resulted in attractive ROI for customers.
% of products less than 2 years old: About 40% are new, while all products were migrated to the .Net platform in the past two years.

AMD
Dirk Meyer
Executive vice president of computational products group
Meyer is responsible for all product development, manufacturing, operations and marketing for the Computational Products Group. He joined AMD in 1996 as director of engineering for the AMD-K7 microprocessor development program. Meyer came to AMD from Digital, where he was co-architect of the Alpha 21064 and 21264 microprocessors.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Extended AMD's architectural leadership by demonstrating the industry's first x86 dual-core processor for 32- and 64-bit computing. Dual-core AMD Opteron processors for servers and workstations are expected to launch in mid-2005, followed by versions for the client market in late 2005.
% of products less than 2 years old: Nearly 100%.

Apple
Avadis "Avie" Tevanian, Jr.
Chief software technology officer
Tevanian joined Apple in 1997 and focuses on setting companywide software technology directions for Apple. He is a recognized pioneer in creating cross-platform development environments used worldwide. Before joining Apple, Tevanian was vice president of engineering at NeXT, responsible for managing NeXT's engineering department. He started his professional career at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a principal designer and engineer of the Mach operating system.

Avaya
Ravi Sethi
President of Avaya Labs
Sethi oversees a 2,500-person R&D team at Avaya focused on converged voice and data communication, CRM and unified communications. He came to Avaya in 2000 from Bell Labs, where he was senior vice president for communications sciences research.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Getting research results and innovation into the company's enterprise communications products and services.
% of products less than 2 years old: Refreshed entire product line in past two to three years.

BEA Systems
Mark Carges
CTO
In his more than eight years with BEA, Carges has been instrumental in leading the strategy, development and integration of several BEA products. He focuses on ensuring innovation inside BEA and adherence to open standards. He is one of the original architects of the Tuxedo transaction processing server, designed when working at AT&T Bell Labs, Unix System Laboratories and Novell.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Launched Apache Beehive, an open-source foundation for building service-oriented architectures that help companies more easily port Java and service-based applications to any server.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%.

BMC Software
Dan Barnea
Senior vice president of research and development
Barnea came to BMC in 1999 and is responsible for all product and technology-related functions. Prior to BMC, he was CEO at New Dimension Software, where he was credited with turning the company's fortunes around. New Dimension was acquired by BMC in 1999.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Developing and acquiring technologies needed to complete BMC Software's Business Service Management (BSM) strategy and product portfolio. Those areas included service-level management, IT discovery, a common management database and configuration management capabilities.
% of products less than 2 years old: During the past two years, BMC Software has acquired solutions from Remedy, Magic and Marimba, while at the same time developing new products. The integration of the two results in new solutions that are less than 2 years old.

Borland
Patrick Kerpan
CTO
Kerpan directs the company's technology strategy and oversees Borland's team of chief scientists. He has more than 20 years of software development experience, joining Borland in 2000 through the acquisition of Bedouin, a company he founded. Before that, he was managing director of derivatives technology for Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Developed significant advances in the domain of integrated application life-cycle management, including a petabyte-scalable file vault, asset distribution for decentralized development teams and a search engine for structured and unstructured data.
% of products less than 2 years old: Approximately 80%.

Check Point Software
Gil Shwed
Founder, chairman and CEO
Shwed is a well-known figure in the Internet security industry, having co-founded Check Point and developed a number of evolutionary technologies, including the original FireWall-1. He also invented Stateful Inspection, now de facto standard technology.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Introduction of the company's internal and Web security product lines, including InterSpect internal security gateway appliance, Connectra, SSL Network Extender and Web Intelligence systems, and the Network Extender technology.
% of products less than 2 years old: Approximately 43%.

Cisco Systems
Charles Giancarlo
CTO
Giancarlo plays a key role in developing and implementing Cisco's technology strategy and vision. In addition, he holds the senior leadership role for two groups, voice technology and global government solutions, and is president of Cisco-Linksys, an independent division of Cisco that provides wired and wireless products for the consumer and SOHO networking market. Giancarlo joined Cisco in 1994 and holds multiple patents in the areas of ATM and voice technologies.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The launch of the self-defending network (Cisco's vision for security systems) and the development of the Cisco-sponsored industry initiative Network Admission Control, along with the delivery of Video Telephony Advantage, the first completely intuitive video telephony capability.
% of products less than 2 years old: An estimated 40%.

Computer Associates
Mark Barrenechea
Executive vice president of product development
Barrenechea is responsible for the majority of CA's worldwide R&D activities, including all technology, worldwide support, product marketing and IT within the company. Prior to joining CA, he held a number of posts at Oracle, including senior vice president of applications development, and was a member of the executive management committee.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Designing a common architecture that enables integration between all of CA's management software solutions, including Unicenter operations management and service management, BrightStor storage management, eTrust security management and AllFusion application life-cycle management.
AMOUNT SPENT ON R&D: Approximately 20% of CA's $3.2 billion in revenue.

Corel
Graham Brown
Executive vice president of software development
Brown is responsible for the development of Corel solutions for homes and small businesses, creative professionals and the enterprise, and leads the team responsible for quality assurance of those product groups. Prior to joining Corel, he served as developer and project lead at ACDS, where he produced Geographic Information Systems.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Since going private last year, Corel's development efforts have focused exclusively on graphics and office productivity business lines. The releases of CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12, WordPerfect Office 12 and Corel Painter IX emphasize a top priority around productivity and compatibility.
AMOUNT SPENT ON R&D: During the past five years, Corel's investments in R&D have been approximately 20% of annual revenue.

D-Link Systems
Steven Joe
President and CEO
Joe has held a leading position in virtually every department of D-Link North America, contributing to the company's growth since its inception in 1986. He has led several key initiatives, including development of Internet-based consumer connectivity products. Joe spearheaded the push to bring wireless connectivity to the masses when he introduced the industry's first complete line of wireless products at retail in 1999.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Introduced an affordable series of business-class entry and midlevel SMB products in both the wired and wireless arenas called the xStack family of switches and AirPremier family of wireless connectivity systems.
% of products less than 2 years old: 95%.

EMC
David A. Donatelli
Executive vice president of storage platforms operations
Donatelli joined EMC in 1987 and currently oversees development of the EMC Symmetrix and CLARiiON families of networked-storage systems and EMC Celerra network-attached storage systems. He is credited with driving EMC into the open-standards systems market in 1995, and evolving the company from a single-product mainframe vendor to one that sells systems ranging from $5,000 to $300,000 today.
Top technology innovation in 2004: In February, EMC updated every storage platform in its portfolio, broadening the range and functionality of everything from the high-end Symmetrix DMX family to the Celerra NAS.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%.

Exabyte
Juan A. Rodriguez
Chairman and CTO
Rodriguez has pioneered advanced computer data storage technologies across four decades. He designed IBM's earliest tape-storage products and developed the world's highest performance tape-storage products at StorageTek in the 1970s. He also designed the world's first 8-mm helical scan data tape drive at Exabyte in the 1980s, and the groundbreaking VXA Packet Technology for tape drives at Ecrix in the 1990s. Rodriguez founded Exabyte in 1985, then Ecrix in 1996, merging the two in 2001.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Release of tape-automation product VXA-2 PacketLoader 1x10 1U, an ultracompact 1U rack-mountable automated backup and restore product built with VXA Packet Technology and Exabyte's world-renowned robotics.
% of products less than 2 years old: 60% of company revenue is generated from products that are 2 years old or less.

Fujitsu Computer Products of America
Chuck Nielsen
chief technologist, disk drive division
Nielsen is responsible for emerging HDD technologies and hardware implementations, and development and product strategies. Prior to joining Fujitsu, he held storage development and executive management positions at IBM and Conner Peripherals. Nielsen has been responsible for ASIC, recording channel, and firmware and printed circuit-board development, and has managed numerous disk-drive development programs.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivering the industry's first Serial-interface mobile and enterprise hard disk drives: the 2.5-inch Serial ATA mobile hard disk drive and the 2.5-inch small form factor Serial-Attached-SCSI enterprise hard disk drive.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%.

Groove Networks
Ray Ozzie
Founder and CEO
Ozzie founded Groove Networks in October 1997, driving the peer-to-peer collaborative networking phenomenon. Previously, he was a founder and president of Iris Associates, where he created and led the development of Lotus Notes, the defining groupware product used by more than 100 million people worldwide.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The shipment of Groove Virtual Office v3.0 in July. This product is the result of direct customer feedback and includes a new forms capability that allows VARs to develop customized applications.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%.

Hewlett-Packard
Shane V. Robison
Executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer
Robison is responsible for shaping the company's overall technology agenda and for leading the company's strategy and corporate development efforts. He leads the technology and strategy councils as well as the development of future technology road maps, working closely with HP's business units and HP Labs. Robison's background includes high-level stints at Compaq, AT&T Labs and Apple.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Building out HP's management software capabilities through a series of software company acquisitions. Creating a dashboard for OpenView that lets CIOs manage and control their own data centers.
AMOUNT SPENT ON R&D: 5%, or $3.6 billion, invested on revenue of $73 billion.

Hitachi Data Systems
Nahoya Takahashi
Vice president and CTO
Takahashi is responsible for leading the company's storage systems and solutions business. He joined Hitachi in 1973; under his leadership, the company developed the first generation and beyond of the revolutionary Lightning and Thunder storage systems.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivered storage virtualization, enabling users to virtualize multiple tiers of storage and multiple storage products into one storage pool that presents a single image to all attached servers.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%.

IBM
Nicholas M. Donofrio
Senior vice president of technology and manufacturing
Donofrio, a 30-plus year IBM veteran, leads the company's technology strategy. His responsibilities range from IBM Research to the Personal Systems Group to IBM's enterprise on-demand transformation team. He also heads the IBM Technology Team and is chairman of the board of governors for the IBM Academy of Technology. He has led many of IBM's major development and manufacturing teams, from semiconductor and storage technologies to microprocessors and PCs.

**Top technology innovation in 2004: IBM initiated the Global Innovation Outlook project to glean new insights about the forces that will shape and change business and society in the coming decade. Donofrio also led the new National Innovation Initiative to formulate a strategy to advance innovation across a broad range of industries.
% of products less than 2 years old: Approximately 75% of our total set of hardware products and nearly 80% of our software products.

Intel
Pat Gelsinger
Senior vice president and CTO
Gelsinger has been with Intel since 1979. He leads Intel's Corporate Technology Group, which encompasses many Intel research activities, driving industry alignment with these technologies and initiatives. As CTO, he coordinates Intel's long-term research efforts and helps ensure consistency from Intel's emerging computing, networking and communications products and technologies.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Intel began delivering power-optimized technology products into the marketplace, which include power technologies at the process, logic, architecture, software and platform levels.
% of products less than 2 years old: $4.4 billion of Intel's revenue in 2003 came from products less than 2 years old.

IONA Technologies
Eric Newcomer
CTO
Newcomer is responsible for Iona's technology road map and direction of the Orbix E2A e-Business Platforms as they relate to standards adoption, architecture and product design. He joined Iona in November 1999 and has been instrumental in Iona's embrace of Web services and XML. Prior to Iona, he held posts at Digital and Sages American Group.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivered Mobile Orchestrator, a new mobile product line that adapts classic store-and-forward middleware concepts to Internet protocols, creating a reliable infrastructure for mobile applications.
% of products less than 2 years old: Approximately 65%.

Jboss
Marc Fleury
President and CEO
Fleury has been at the forefront of the open-source movement, founding JBoss in 2001 to provide services, including development and production support, training, consulting and documentation, for users of the open-source JBoss Application Server. Fleury, who was previously with Sun, founded the JBoss project and developed the first release of JBoss AS in 1999 while working as an independent consultant.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivered JBoss Application Server 4.0, the enterprise production version of JBoss AS 4.0, that is both a milestone product release for the company and the first open-source app server to be certified compatible with the J2EE 1.4 specification.
% of products less than 2 years old: 70%.

Juniper
Pradeep Sindhu
CTO
Sindhu recognized in the mid-'90s that a new networking design paradigm was required to handle Internet growth, so he left his post as principal scientist at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC and founded Juniper Networks. Sindhu is currently responsible for the company's technical road map and plays an active role in day-to-day design and development of future products. At PARC, Sindhu worked on technologies that led to the commercial development of Sun's first high-performance multiprocessor system family.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Rallied key industry players from both the telecom and IT worlds behind the Infranet Initiative. The "infranet" vision outlines a blueprint for a business-class infrastructure that moves IP networking beyond the limitations of today's Internet, enabling businesses to seamlessly operate applications, such as IP telephony, telepresence (e.g. peer-to-peer collaboration), and utility and grid computing.

LANDesk Software
Tom Davis
Vice president of engineering
Davis oversees development of all LANDesk product lines and international engineering teams, and has extensive experience in all aspects of software engineering, management and strategic product direction. During 11 years at Intel, he served as engineering director and CTO of the software products and services division, and was instrumental in driving Intel's definition of the systems-management space.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Released the third major upgrade in two years to LANDesk's flagship product. LANDesk Management Suite Version 8.1 is a software solution that contains more than 250 million lines of code. Specific innovations include patch management, OS deployment, profile migration, software license management and auto-device discovery.
AMOUNT SPENT ON R&D: In 2003, we estimated it to be around 24%. In 2004, revenue has been growing faster than our R&D expenses, so it may be a little less.

LINSPIRE
Michael L. Robertson
CEO
Robertson founded Linspire and headed development of the Linux-style operating system that runs in Windows environments. Robertson's past ventures include being founder, CEO and chairman at MP3.com. He created MP3 technology, amassing more than 1 million downloadable MP3 files. He also served as president and CEO of Media Minds, a developer of digital-picture software.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Development of Hot Words, which is a set of features within Linspire's Internet suite that allows one-click Web searches on words on any Web page or e-mail message. Every word that appears on a Web site or in an e-mail can be clicked and then instantly searched using a pop-up menu that performs Web, shopping and news searches.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%.

Macromedia
Kevin Lynch
Executive vice president and chief software architect
Lynch has been instrumental in shaping the Macromedia product family since joining the company in 1996. Most recently, Lynch led the MX initiative at Macromedia, which unified its tool, server and player software. In his career, Lynch defined and led the initial development of Macromedia Dreamweaver, the market-leading product among professional Web developers. Prior to joining Macromedia, he pioneered a navigational user interface for handheld communicators at General Magic.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Further exploited XML with Macromedia products to make it far easier to build rich Internet applications that blend the best of the desktop in terms of responsiveness and interactivity with the best of the Web in terms of deployment and maintainability.
% of products less than 2 years old: A plethora of new products was just introduced this past year in areas such as Macromedia Breeze and Flex.

McAfee ( Network Associates )
Chris Bolin
CTO and executive vice president
Bolin is responsible for the worldwide development of all Network Associates' products and has been instrumental in driving international growth. He assembled and managed a new engineering team in the United Kingdom after Network Associates' acquisition of Dr. Solomon and launched a new development office in India, now the largest development center for the company. Prior to joining Network Associates in 1998, Bolin was the engineering director of Cyber Media, where he co-developed consumer antivirus products with Trend Micro.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Developed security intrusion-prevention technology that minimized or completely eliminated the impact of viruses, malware and hacking attempts of the highest-profile security events of the year.
% of products less than 2 years old: 70%

Microsoft
Craig Mundie
CTO
Mundie works with chief software architect Bill Gates to develop a comprehensive set of technical, business and policy strategies for Microsoft. Mundie is charged with coordinating strategic technology implementations that span multiple Microsoft product groups. He focuses on Internet-scale platform architectures, and technical and policy issues around critical infrastructure protection. He joined Microsoft in 1992 after co-founding Alliant Computer Systems, a company that developed massively parallel supercomputers.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Microsoft is building more secure products as part of its Trustworthy Computing initiative. The company has identified patterns in terms of attacks, things like network attacks, e-mail attacks and buffer overruns, and has been seeking ways to vaccinate against them en masse. The 2004 release of Windows XP SP2 brings many of these features to bear, including a firewall enabled by default to mitigate network attacks, and safer handling of e-mail attachments and Web downloads.
AMOUNT SPENT ON R&D: In FY '04, Microsoft spent $7.7 billion, or 24% of revenue, on R&D.

Net Integration Technologies
Ozzy Papic
Founder, president and CEO
Papic is an expert in computer networking technologies. His track record includes managing the growth and development of several successful high-tech start-up companies. Prior to founding Net Integration Technologies, Papic co-founded HighwayOne, a wireless broadband telecommunications company that is now part of Telefonica, and Pritel Communications, a Canadian Internet company.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivered Nitix, an autonomic, Linux-based server operating system, as a standalone software product. Previously, Nitix was only sold as a bundled software/hardware server appliance.
% of products less than 2 years old: Nitix is continually evolving with enhancements and releases every few months.

Network Appliance
Dave Hitz
Founder and executive vice president of engineering
>Hitz is responsible for the future technology strategy and direction of Network Appliance, which he co-founded in 1992 with James Lau to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking. They did this by building dedicated devices called appliances. Prior to this, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex, an enterprise storage solution provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Built enterprise-class storage system with technologies like RAID-DP that are capable of running a variety of data applications out of inexpensive disk drives. The company focused on three things: making cheap drives safe, making them manageable and identifying applications that best work in this model.

Novell
Alan Nugent
CTO
Nugent's role at Novell includes responsibility for promoting Novell's open-standards, cross-platform technologies and evangelizing Novell's security, provisioning and networking solutions. An industry veteran whose work in open standards is widely regarded, Nugent previously was managing partner for technology at Palladian Partners services firm, as well as having posts at Vectant, Xerox and others.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Design and development of Novell's "identity driven" enterprise approach, whereby the company repurposes existing systems based on the composite digital identity of the person or service.
% of products less than 2 years old: Approximately 40%. Much of the rest of the technology also has been migrated to Linux.

Oracle
Thomas Kurian
Senior vice president of development
Kurian is steward of Oracle's middleware platform products, including Oracle Application Server and the company's development tools. He is responsible for shaping all technological aspects of the products' development, release process, management and business development. He has worked at Oracle since 1996 and played a key role in transforming Oracle into an e-business. Previous posts include one as a consultant with McKinsey and Co.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivering on a vision to increase the flexibility and efficiency of IT via a single middleware platform that combines service-oriented architectures and grid computing.
% of products less than 2 years old: About 60%.

OSDL
Linus Torvalds
OSDL Fellow
Torvalds is the legendary creator of Linux and owns the Linux trademark. He published the first Linux kernel in 1991 as a university student in Helsinki. With the support of OSDL, Torvalds works full time on future development of the kernel. Prior to OSDL, he worked for Transmeta.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The Linux 2.6 kernel was released in December 2003 and continues to be improved upon. It provides significant performance, reliability and scalability boosts in a wide range of computing uses for Linux, from embedded to desktop to data center and telecommunications applications.
% of products less than 2 years old: Linux is continually improved; the Linux 2.6 kernel was released in December 2003.

Palm One
Jeff Hawkins
CTO
Hawkins brings nearly 20 years of technical expertise to his role as Palm One's chief technology officer. He co-founded Handspring with Donna Dubinsky in July 1998. Five years prior, he had founded Palm Computing, where, in 1994, he invented the original PalmPilot products. Hawkins, who holds nine patents for handheld devices and features, is often credited as the designer who reinvented that market.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Palm One introduced several important technologies in 2004, not the least of which was changing the way data was stored in the Treo 650 smartphone by switching to a nonvolatile memory model. For the first time, it is nearly impossible to lose data, even if the battery is permanently removed from the device.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100% of currently shipping handhelds and smartphones.

Research in Motion (RIM)
Mike Lazaridis
Co-CEO and President
Lazaridis founded RIM while a student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. At RIM, he is responsible for product strategy, R&D, product development and manufacturing. Known in the wireless industry as a visionary, he holds a raft of patents from the flagship Blackberry to DigiSync, a film key code reader used in motion picture labs.
Top technology innovation in 2004: To reach the more "phone-centric" population of users, RIM introduced SureType technology on its BlackBerry 7100 wireless handhelds. Integrating a keyboard and software system, SureType combines a traditional phone keypad and a familiar QWERTY keyboard to create an efficient and familiar dialing and typing experience.
% of products less than 2 years old: Many of the current BlackBerry Wireless Handheld products are less than 2 years old.

RSA Security
Joe Uniejewski
CTO and senior vice president of corporate development
Uniejewski plays a key role in driving RSA's technical direction and is responsible for managing strategy and key business relationships. Most recently, he served as senior vice president for Web access management products, where he spearheaded development of RSA's ClearTrust solutions. He came to RSA in 1998 with more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The ability to redesign and redefine strong two-factor authentication, and a series of product launches, including RSA SecurID for Microsoft Windows and RSA Federated Identity Manager.
% of products less than 2 years old: 50%.

Salesforce.com
Dave Moellenhoff
CTO and co-founder
Moellenhoff co-founded Salesforce.com in 1999 with the goal of revolutionizing the concept of enterprise software. As CTO, he is responsible for the architecture and design of the salesforce.com systems, pushing the vision of software as a utility as opposed to a licensed CD. Prior to Salesforce.com, he was president of Left Coast Software, a San Francisco-based Java consulting firm he co-founded.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Custom Objects have been the drivers to customizing the salesforce.com CRM offering and are something new for a hosted service.
% of products less than 2 years old: Virtually all.

Samsung Electronics America
Seoggi Kim
vice president of research and development, Monitor Group
Kim has 14 years of experience in the field of CRT display tube and LCD monitor R&D, and is acknowledged as one of the world's top technical experts in the display industry. He is currently directing efforts to differentiate Samsung's display products through the development of new scalers, color-enhancement chips, asset management and Pivot software.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Development of Samsung's fourth-generation line of multifunction monitors (5-in-1 with TV, composite video, S-video, component HD video, PC), which vastly improved picture performance, enabled use of a single universal worldwide tuner and incorporated new scaling technology.
% of products less than 2 years old: Virtually all current display products.

SAP
Shai Agassi
Executive Board Member
Agassi is responsible for SAP's overall technology strategy and execution, overseeing the development of the integration and application platform, SAP NetWeaver and SAP xApps. Agassi also co-leads the Suite Architecture team at SAP, which aligns all of SAP's software on one foundation. Prior to SAP, Agassi founded Top Tier Software, which SAP acquired in 2001.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Introduction of SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture, which provides a blueprint for services-based, enterprise-scale business solutions and flexible IT infrastructures. SAP NetWeaver is the technology platform that enables the architecture, which leverages Web services and other open standards and allows for componentization of existing systems.

StorageTek
Pierre Cousin
Corporate vice president of research, development and engineering
Cousin aligns the company's engineering functions into a centralized research, development and engineering organization. This group oversees the work on design and development programs that support the Automated Tape Solutions and the Information Lifecycle Management Solutions business units. He joined StorageTek in 1997 and previously spent eight years at Bull.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Launched new SL8500 and SL500 storage libraries with larger footprints, capacity, higher availability and modularity, and new open virtual tape offering.
% of products less than 2 years old: 90%.

Sun Microsystems
Greg Papadopoulos
CTO
Papadopoulos, a 20-year industry veteran, is responsible for managing Sun's technology and architecture, standards, the Science Office, global engineering architecture and associated advanced development programs. He also provides leadership and consistency for hardware and software architectures across Sun. Prior to joining Sun in 1994, he was senior architect and director of product strategy for Thinking Machines, and was an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, where he conducted research in scalable systems, multithreaded/ dataflow processor architecture, functional and declarative languages, and fault-tolerant computing.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Innovations to Sun's Solaris operating system. Solaris 10 OS is the cornerstone of Sun's high-performance network computing offerings. Installations of the product as part of Sun's Software Express for Solaris program have now reached more than half a million. % of products less than 2 years old: About 80%.

Sybase
Raj Nathan
Senior vice president and general manager of R&D
Nathan leads Sybase's technology research and product development. In this role, he has become widely known for pioneering new technology, remaining close to customers and for his breadth of technology expertise. Nathan's work experience has taken him around the globe, including stints at Unisys and Siemens Pyramid. Before entering private industry, Nathan spent many years in academia as a professor of engineering.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Introduced more new products in 2004 than any other time in the company's history. Began building out the architecture underlying a strategy, called Unwired Enterprise, and launched a new line of "unwired" products that rapidly mobilize and extend enterprise data and applications to mobile users.
Amount spent on R&D: In the first half of 2004, Sybase spent 15.4% of revenue on direct product development.

Symantec
Robert A. Clyde
CTO
Clyde sets technology vision and strategy for Symantec. Under his direction, he founded specialized teams at the company, including Symantec Research Labs and Symantec Security Response. With 25 years of experience, he is considered a pioneer in the development of intrusion-detection and policy-compliance products. Prior to Symantec, he co-founded Axent Technologies.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Helped create generic exploit blocking, a new technology designed to stop threats before they emerge and to protect vulnerable software against future attack. It has been integrated into Symantec products and will enable security experts to examine software vulnerabilities and identify the specific stream of data that must be sent over the network to exploit a vulnerability. They can then produce a signature that detects and blocks any attack that meets the exploit criteria.

3COM
Sudhakar Ramakrishna
VP of Product Line Management
Ramakrishna is responsible for introducing leading-edge converged networking products for 3Com. He joined 3Com in 1996, serving as vice president of product-line management for CommWorks, a wholly owned subsidiary of 3Com, providing IP-based networks for large telecom service providers. Prior to 3Com, he was technical lead for Lachman Technologies, a network stack equipment provider, where he developed protocol stacks for TCP/IP, network file systems and remote-access technologies.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The most innovative product from 3Com in 2004 is the 3Com Convergence Applications Suite, a new category of product designed to take advantage of network convergence through an open standards-based technology. It delivers enhanced messaging, conferencing and contact-center applications.
% of products less than 2 years old: 60% to 70%.

VeriSign
Judy Lin
Executive vice president
Lin manages the worldwide development activities for several major lines of business, including authentication services, Web trust and payment services, and managed security services. She joined VeriSign in 1996 and was instrumental in building the company's market-leading Internet- and enterprise-managed PKI services. Prior to joining VeriSign, Lin held posts at Taligent, Apple and HP.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Introduction of the VeriSign Unified Authentication solution. This new security solution comprises a comprehensive software and services platform coupled with VeriSign's new family of multipurpose authentication tokens, including One Time Password, PKI and smart-card functionality.
% of products less than 2 years old: 25%.

VERITAS Software
Mark Bregman
CTO
Bregman oversees the engineering and product management departments at Veritas to ensure integrated product delivery. He is responsible for expanding the company's portfolio of storage software solutions. Prior to Veritas, Bregman was CEO of Airmedia, a wireless Internet firm. He also spent 16 years at IBM, where he managed the RS/6000 and Pervasive Computing divisions, IBM Research and IBM Japan. He was also technical assistant to then-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner. Top technology innovation in 2004: Unveiled the CommandCentral family of service-level management products to enable IT organizations to more efficiently provide infrastructure services that are measurable, accountable and precisely integrated with business objectives, thereby enabling higher service levels while lowering IT costs. CommandCentral software enables IT to move toward a utility-computing model.
% of products less than 2 years old: All leading Veritas products have seen significant revision in the past 12 to 18 months.

Wyse Technology
Curt Schwebke
Vice president and CTO
Schwebke is responsible for the company's technology road map, working closing with industry partners and cross-functional departments to evaluate opportunities for investment and new business. Prior to Wyse, he worked for Mindset, a start-up, as well as Calma-G.E. and Intel Memory Systems.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Chosen as a strategic partner by Intel to create the industry's first video client based on Wyse's thin client embedded management technology. Created a reference design platform that spans both Commercial Digital Signage and Video Kiosk applications, as well as Consumer Advanced Set-Top box via broadband applications.
Amount spent on R&D: Consistently invest more than 8% of revenue in R&D.

Xerox
Sophie V. Vandebroek
Chief engineer and vice president
Vandebroek's organization is responsible for Xerox's platform-planning and product-delivery effectiveness. Her group provides the tools and processes to develop global products and solutions, strengthens the Xerox engineering capabilities and prioritizes the $1 billion annual R&D investments. Before re-joining Xerox in 2002 (where she had worked for a decade previous), Vandebroek was CTO at Carrier.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Launched the platforms that power the solid-ink Phaser 8400 multifunction device and the new line of black and white Nuvera 100/120 light volume production printers, also based on a new product platform. In addition, began implementing more remote smart diagnostics and extending the use of synthetic toner in a wide variety of machines.
% of products less than 2 years old: More than half of Xerox's revenue last year came from offerings that were introduced in the past two years.

Airespace
Pat Calhoun
CTO
Calhoun heads technical development and strategy for the wireless LAN stalwart Airespace. His experience with wireless technologies is broad, including previous stints running the Sun Laboratories research project that created a prototype of next-generation core and radio access network (RAN) wireless network using IP only devices. And at US Robotics/3Com, Calhoun designed virtual LAN trunking protocol (VTP), a virtual router that became the first Internet VPN service deployed.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Developed an extension to the 802.11i specification called Proactive Key Caching (PKC). PKC takes advantage of next-generation hierarchical WLAN systems and eliminates the need to re-authenticate at every access-point hand-off in a wireless network, thereby improving roaming and performance.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%

Enterasys Networks'
John Roese
CTO
Roese oversees development of the company's technology architectures, including comprehensive quality of service, security, management and transport services. He also leads the company's initiatives in the Internet2/NGI effort and coordinates Enterasys' intellectual property portfolio. Prior to becoming CTO, Roese held a variety of positions at Cabletron Systems.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The complete refresh of the Enterasys product line and placing strategic focus on Secure Networks, which takes what was a core design principle of Enterasys products to date -- flow-based networking -- and extends it to the company's wired/wireless infrastructure products.
% of products less than 2 years old: Approximately 50%

Emulex
Greg Scherer
Senior Vice President And CTO
Scherer has more than 24 years experience in the computer industry, the past 20 of which have been in various roles at Emulex. He has been instrumental in the development of Emulex's LightPulse family of Fibre Channel PCI host bus adapters.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Creation of 4-Gb Fibre Channel infrastructure. Emulex was first to introduce a 4-Gb Fibre Channel embedded switch (SOC 422) and has been working on HBA/embedded I/O controller technology to complement the 4-Gb space.
% of products less than 2 years old: 75%

Fortinet'
Michael Xie
CTO
Xie, who has 10 years of experience in network security, is also founder and vice president of engineering for Fortinet. Previously he served as vice president of engineering for ServGate, software director and architect at NetScreen, and security architect for Milkyway. He holds multiple U.S. patents. Top technology innovation in 2004: In 2004, Fortinet introduced the latest version of FortiOS operating system. It includes more than 50 new technology enhancements, most notably the addition of Dynamic Attack Protection, which combines intrusion detection/prevention (IDP) with antivirus and firewall functions.
% of products less than 2 years old: 60%

Legato Software'
George J. Symons
CTO
Symons is responsible for product strategy, technical direction and technology acquisition. He joined Legato in April 1999 after Legato acquired FullTime Software, where he served as vice president of engineering.

Maximizer Software
Tom Bennett
Co-President And CTO
Bennett sets technology direction and oversees product management, research and development, quality assurance, customer support and services groups and projects at Maximizer Software. He has more than 15 years of software development experience and was one of original developers of Maximizer's contact management product.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Release of Maximizer Enterprise 8, an affordable CRM solution that helps small and midsize businesses succeed with an integrated suite of software tools for sales, marketing, and customer service and support.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%

Mitel Networks
' Jim Davies
CTO
Davies is a driving force behind the strategic direction of Mitel's IP telephony solutions portfolio. Appointed as CTO in 2003, he brings a working history rich in R&D and business experience within telecommunications. Prior to Mitel Networks Jim worked nine years in R&D roles at Nortel Networks where he acquired broad product development experience in hardware, ASIC, embedded software and applications.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The company has worked on reducing the complexity of VoIP for VARs by simplifying the process of installation, diagnostics, maintenance and application integration with the IP system.
% of products less than 2 years old: 40%

N-able Technologies
' Louis Payant
CTO
As former vice president and general manager of Nokia, Payant brings a wealth of experience in the areas of mobile technology, product and software development, and product marketing of enterprise business solutions. At Nokia, Payant led the complete product-creation process, including product management, research and development, quality control, product marketing, documentation and training. Top technology innovation in 2004: The creation of the Security Event Manager represents N-able's flagship innovation for 2004. It enables VARs to create custom monitoring services on leading third party security appliances and deliver event correlation between various services.
% of products less than 2 years old: 100%

Netgear
Mark Merrill
CTO
Merrill co-founded Netgear in 1996 and is responsible for developing the company's technology strategy. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design and manufacturing of electronic products. Previously, he held positions at SynOptics Communications, a local area networking company that later merged with Wellfleet and became Bay Networks.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The introduction of Netgear's Gigabit Smart Switch, which integrates a Web-based GUI for configuration and monitoring of a network device that significantly lowers cost.
% of products less than 2 years old: 90%

NetSuite
Evan Goldberg
CTO
Goldberg spent eight years at Oracle as vice president, where he played a role in a variety of projects focused on making powerful database technology more accessible to users. When he left Oracle, he started mBED Software and built groundbreaking Web site technology. He founded NetSuite in 1998.
Top technology innovation in 2004: Delivering the first integrated business application for small and [midsize] businesses that allows companies to sell more by mining customer purchasing information.
% of products less than 2 years old: 25%

Nortel Networks'
D.G. Mumford
CTO
Since 1971, Mumford has enjoyed a varied and successful career with Nortel Networks. He has led the product development and design teams for Nortel Networks' Fiber Optics product line and product management for the DMS product line during the '80s. He played leadership roles in Nortel's expansion into optical networking and development of its 10-Gbps and DWDM products.

Seagate Technology'
Mark Kryder
Senior Vice President and CTO
Kryder joined Seagate as senior vice president of research in 1998 and built Seagate Research into the leading industrial research laboratory in the field of data-storage technology. Prior to coming to Seagate, Kryder was a founding director of the Data Storage Systems Center at Carnegie Mellon University and was a member of the research staff at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Top technology innovation in 2004: The demonstration of world-record areal densities near 200 Gbps in magnetic recording. % of products less than 2 years old: Within six months, more than 80% of products will be new.