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2002 InfoWorld Innovators
The Year's Top Ten Technology Innovators
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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.
To choose the Technology Innovators, InfoWorld's senior editorial team
identified the masterminds behind the technologies that made the biggest
impact on business in the last year. Listed in alphabetical order, these
individuals authored, evangelized, and shepherded the protocols, products,
and concepts that are driving IT into the future. And we expect to see the
same from the six up-and-comers on the Ones to Watch list.
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
RanadivŽ, 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.
John Crawford - Intel's processor pioneer strikes gold again
Mike Lazaridis - BlackBerry genius shares simple secret of success: Listen to your customers
Andy Mendelsohn - Breaking new ground is old hat for Oracle's long-time visionary database developer
Dave Moellenhoff - ASP founder predicts the end of software as we know it
Larry Page and Sergey Brin - The Internet's most famous pair of Ph.D.s are still striving to make data more accessible
Clifford Neuman - For Kerberos co-author, security hasn't lost its allure
Ray Ozzie - Notes inventor envisions peer-to-peer technology supplanting e-mail
Vivek Ranadivé - Real-time computing pioneer is taking his message to the enterprise masses
Dave Winer - SOAP co-author strives for simplicity and drives decentralization
Mark Lucovsky - The brains behind HailStorm sees Web services as a hub for simplifying busy lives
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Related Links |
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Hall of fame 2002 - Several industry icons join InfoWorld's Innovators Hall of Fame |
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Ones to Watch 2002 - These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months |
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Where are they now? - Since the 2000 Ones to Watch were named, many dot-coms imploded and the economy
soured. How have these technological talents fared? |
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