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 NEWSTop ten technology innovators By Jennifer Jones February 27, 2002 5:01 pm PT Peruse the Top Ten Technology Innovators profiled this year, and it becomes clear that necessity is not only the mother of invention, but of innovation as well. We were struck by these innovators' accounts of initial contributions that opened the door to larger challenges -- and in turn to subsequent innovations.
Intel Fellow John Crawford, two decades after serving as chief architect on the 386 processor, again took the lead role in another revolutionizing technology spun out of Intel: the Itanium-based server line. Likewise, Senior Vice President Andy Mendelsohn spearheaded both the Oracle8i and 9i charges. And Mark Lucovsky, one of Microsoft's few distinguished engineers, made his most recent mark -- after a series of earlier successes as a founding member of the Windows NT team -- with My Services, part of the software giant's current .Net initiative. Still, the advancements ushered in by Crawford, Mendelsohn, Lucovsky and the other Top Ten Technology Innovators are far from incremental victories. Oracle's latest database release and Intel's Itanium line, for instance, promise enterprise scalability gains now crucial to the industry. Pragmatism seemed to reign in 2001, a year marked by sobering national events and economic peril. During these uncertain times, enterprise officials nevertheless pressed their vendors for innovation. Therefore, this group captures the dual emphasis on ingenuity and enterprise basics. That partially drove the selection of Innovators such as Tibco's CEO Vivek Ranadivé, who pioneered the concept of real-time computing using his company's very utilitarian message-oriented middleware. Beating the drum for real time on a different front was University of Southern California's security guru Clifford Neuman, who developed the Kerberos system to provide instantaneous authentication of users on networks such as Microsoft's .Net. Despite their focus on enterprise staples, this year's Innovators in no way lack imagination. Consider UserLand Software's CEO Dave Winer, tapped for contributing the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) standard. Along with innovation, Winer's Web services push has been packed with personality -- Winer has declared that his overarching goal is to turn over to users the power to connect applications. User empowerment brings us to the notion of peer-to-peer computing and Ray Ozzie, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Groove Networks. Ozzie spent most of last year artfully approaching enterprises with the largely foreign concept of p-to-p. All the while, he has offered practical reassurances that the technology could balance end-users' need for autonomy and IT administrators' need for control. Also bent on empowering users is wireless device pioneer Research In Motion, whose co-CEO Mike Lazaridis proved his chic BlackBerry indeed has a place in enterprise computing. New concepts with equal doses of staying power mark Dave Moellenhoff, CTO of Salesforce.com. Hailing from one of only two dot-coms included on this year's list, Moellenhoff -- amid the demise of many ASPs -- also forged enterprise inroads with his company's online CRM push. The other Internet company included this year is search giant Google, where co-founding top executives Larry Page and Sergey Brin honed search technology developed during their years at Stanford University. As evidenced by the 10 Innovators, the six Ones to Watch, additions to the Hall of fame, and an update on last year's Ones to Watch (see our 2002 Technology Innovators package), not only is there a place for the progressive alongside the pragmatic, but also there's a need to strike a balance between the two for the growth of enterprise computing. Return to our 2002 Innovators package. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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