the most powerful people in enterprise tech

Goetz is an enterprise funding powerhouse. Just look at all these boards he s on: Appirio, Barracuda Networks, Clearwell Systems, eMeter, Flite, Jive Software, MetaSwitch, Nimble Storage, Palo Alto Networks, Pocket Gems, and Sencha. He made news last year when he encouraged more startups to think about building companies that serve the enterprise instead of serving the consumer.

Li is one of those Valley people whom everyone who s anyone knows. He s big into funding cloud and big data startups and led Accel into creating a $100 million Big Data Fund, bringing in advisors from Facebook, Standford, and Bit.ly to help him run it. His investments include BitTorrent, Blue Jeans Network, Cloudera, and others.

Narayen has been CEO of Adobe since 2007, expanding Adobe beyond its roots as a graphics software maker into areas as diverse as web metrics and social marketing. He s not afraid to be experimental and earlier this year took the brave step of radically changing the way the company charges for software, adopting a 100% cloud subscription model. There s been customer push back, and the whole software industry is watching to see how Narayen navigates through it.

Hurd s boss, Larry Ellison, has a vision for Oracle s next decade. He wants Oracle to be the Apple of the enterprise, meaning a one stop shop for software and hardware. It s Hurd s job to execute on the vision. He s been retooling Oracle s salesforce to handle the brave new world of hardware sales. His name has also been on the shortlist to become the next CEO of Dell should activist investor Carl Icahn s bid to take over Dell prevail (though Hurd says he has no interest in that job).

Mike Gregoire joined CA Technologies as CEO in January. He had been in retirement after selling his former company, Taleo, to Oracle in 2012 for $1.9 billion. CA is a huge and interesting challenge for Gregoire. Like other aging enterprise software companies, it needs to figure out how to shake off its dusty image and make itself relevant for the next generation of data centers. Gregoire has his eye on security software for the Internet of Things and new forms of network management managing software that work well in the cloud, he told us.

If Werner Vogels is AWS s visionary, Jassy is the execution guy. He runs Amazon s cloud, including its two biggest services: renting computers and renting storage space. Amazon is poised to make its cloud a bigger deal to the enterprise, even potentially snagging a huge contract with the CIA. Jassy previously helped Amazon get into the digital music market, too.

In the storage industry NetApp has become the Pepsi to EMC s Coke, albeit NetApp is far smaller than EMC. Georgens has been CEO since 2009. He studied at EMC s knee, spending 11 years in engineering before becoming CEO of LSI Logic s storage unit Engenio until NetApp bought Engenio for $480 million in 2011. Under Georgens, NetApp has grown revenue from about $4 billion in 2010 to over $6 billion in 2012.

In mid 2011, Daumard jumped ship from Microsoft to join Apple. He was charged with helping Apple build relationships with resellers who wanted to sell its iPhones and iPads to businesses and use them in other ways, such as with custom apps. Apple had almost no relationship with resellers before he arrived. And his progress since then has been nothing less than stellar. Apple devices, particularly the iPad, are storming the enterprise these days.

Hanrahan is one of the biggest names in big data. The company he helped found, Tableau, which creates charts/graphs from large volumes of data and, just had a spectacular IPO. He s also a Canon professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford and an advisor to a other big data startups, like Skytree. And he helped Pixar studios create its award winning rendering tech, earning two Oscars along the way.

Facebook is the world s largest social network. It takes enormous amounts of computing power to let people worldwide share photos, chat and post their thoughts. Frankovsky leads a consortium that is slowly changing the way computer hardware is built, putting designs into the hands of the users (like Facebook) instead of the vendors (like Dell or HP). He wants his organization to do for hardware what Linus Torvalds and Linux did for software, and he s having a lot of success.