the most powerful people in enterprise tech

After successfully making VMware into one of the biggest, most important enterprise software companies, Maritz has taken on a new challenge for VMware s parent company, EMC: to create a cloud computing/big data spinoff. He s now the CEO of Pivotal. In geek speak it is a platform as a service for building big data apps. In simpler terms, it intersects two big trends: cloud computing and big data, meaning it will let app developers write the type of apps that use lots data and will then host those apps.

Bhusri is the second half of the dream team who co founded Workday. He was an executive with Duffield back at Peoplesoft, staying through the onslaught of Peoplesoft s hostile takeover by Oracle. In addition to Workday, he s helped to fund a whole crop of other hot enterprise cloud startups including Okta, Cloudera, ServiceNow, and Zuora.

Casado has rocked the enterprise tech world with a tech he created while he was a grad student at Stanford. It s called OpenFlow and it does for networks what VMware does for servers. A year ago VMware snapped up his startup, and him, for a shocking $1.26 billion. Cisco has been put on notice that Casado s tech is coming and could upend the networking giant. Everyone in the enterprise tech industry is watching Casado.

Nadella s star and power keeps on rising. First, CEO Steve Ballmer handed him the critical Server and Tools Business in 2011, replacing longtime Microsoft vet Bob Muglia, who left the company. He s also leading Microsoft s Amazon killer cloud. And he s expected to get an even bigger role in Ballmer s new plans to reorganize the company.

Vogels will forever be known as the IT visionary who helped Amazon create its game changing cloud computing service. Although he didn t build Amazon s first generation cloud, he s known as the architect of Amazon s strategy. In 2013, under Vogel s eye, Amazon is gearing up to storm the enterprise as companies spend billions of dollars on cloud services. Vogels will forever be known as the IT visionary who helped Amazon create its game changing cloud computing service. Although he didn t build Amazon s first generation cloud, he s known as the architect of Amazon s strategy. In 2013, under Vogel s eye, Amazon is gearing up to storm the enterprise as companies spend billions of dollars on cloud services.

When it comes to new technologies taking the enterprise by storm, none is bigger than big data. When it comes to naming the most established big data startup, Cloudera is at the top of the list. Cloudera offers a popular big data tech called Hadoop. It has also raised the most venture funds among big data startups with $141 million to date. With such visibility Amr Awadallah who hails from Hadoop s birthplace, Yahoo has become a sought after speaker at big data conferences.

Billionaire Hasso Plattner has dragged his enterprise software giant SAP into the brave new world of big data, mobile, and cloud computing, with huge acquisitions like SuccessFactors ($3.4 billion); Ariba ($4.3 billion), a hot database product called HANA, and a bunch of mobile tools. He s now teaching the next generation about enterprise software. He was a major backer of the Institute of Design at Stanford and he created the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Berlin.

Templeton has been CEO since 2001 and in that time has masterfully guided Citrix from one new market opportunity to another. Today it is one of three big contenders duking it out for a share of the soon to be huge cloud computing market. It makes the underlying technology for clouds and competes with VMware and a consortium known as OpenStack.

Whitehurst is the down t0 earth CEO turning Red Hat into the next big enterprise software powerhouse. First he led Red Hat to be the first and only billion dollar pure open source company. Now he s on a mission to turn Red Hat into a $3 billion company and move it far beyond its roots as a supplier of the Linux operating system and into the cloud.

Last September, EMC had two of its top executives get up and change chairs. Gelsinger was formerly EMC s COO running its most important tech unit. He changed seats with Paul Maritz who was VMware s CEO. Gelsinger is tasked with taking VMware into a brand new era of computing. VMware wants to dominate cloud computing and a new technology called software defined networking. SDN has the potential to completely change the way companies build their networks and VMware could swallow the lion s share of billions in new revenue that SDN is certain to create.