the most powerful people in enterprise tech

John McAdam became CEO of network equipment company F5 Networks in July 2000 right before the Internet bubble burst. After that it looked like F5 was not long for this world. But he dug in and grew the company s revenue from $108.6 million to more than $1 billion. Today F5 s stock trades for about $75 with a market cap of nearly $6 billion which has allowed it to go shopping, including snapping up SDN startup LineRate in February.

Bridget Van Kralingen is part of CEO Ginni Rometty s brain trust. Shortly after Rometty took over, the man who almost got the CEO job instead, Michael Daniels, retired. He had been running IBM s huge services division. Rometty replaced him with two executives: Van Kralingen and Erich Clementi. Rometty just gave Clementi a new job. He s off to build IBM s new cloud division, leaving Van Kralingen to run this $40.2 billion division that employs more than 100,000 people.

Among HP s rather bleak financials, where revenues in nearly every business unit are shrinking, the networking unit stands out for growing a tiny bit, 1%, mostly by stealing share away from rival Cisco. Mayer gets the credit. Under her, HP was one of the earliest big players to jump on the software defined networking market that promises to radically alter the way companies build networks.

Intel is struggling to redefine itself in a post PC world, where so many devices run on low power chips from competitor ARM Holdings. Diane Bryant runs one of the units in Intel s stronghold, the chips that run nine of every 10 servers sold worldwide, generating more than $10 billion in revenue in 2012. These chips will also power next generation enterprise and cloud servers as well as storage and networks.

Before becoming a VC, Scott Sandell worked at Microsoft, helping to create Microsoft s popular PC operating system, Windows 95. Since he s become a VC, he s shown up at the center of many of the enterprise industry s biggest deals. He was an early investor in Workday, 2012 s biggest enterprise IPO. He also backed Nicira, (bought by VMware for $1.26 billion), Fusion io (2011 IPO), and Tableau Software (2013 IPO). His current startup roster includes CloudFlare, Blue Jeans Network, BloomReach, and MuleSoft.

Success follows Nir Zuk around. Palo Alto Networks was one of the hot enterprise IPOs in 2012. In his early days at Check Point Software, Nir actually helped invent the firewall industry that Palo Alto Networks disrupts. Nir was also CTO at firewall maker NetScreen Technologies, acquired by Juniper Networks in 2004 for $4 billion. He co founded another security company before that, OneSecurePrior.

Maynard Webb has a long and storied career and he still seems to be everywhere these days. He is the former CEO and current chairman of the board at cloud contact center firm LiveOps, a board member at Salesforce.com, the interim chairman of Yahoo and a well known Angel investor. Some call him a super angel. He s also credited with helping eBay become a multi billion company under his mentor, Meg Whitman. As an investor, some of his successes include Peribit (acquired by Juniper Networks) and AdMob (acquired by Google). Through his Webb Investment network fund, he s backed such companies as Badgville, Diffbot, Nebula, and Okta.

Bryant is the leader of the OpenStack Technical Committee, an elected position within the OpenStack Foundation. OpenStack is a free and open source cloud operating system that competes with Amazon and VMware. Big companies like Red Hat, IBM and HP have banked their futures on it and the stakes are huge. The public cloud market will generate $131 billion this year alone, Gartner says. Much of that rests on the shoulders of Bryant and his committee.

Greg Kroah Hartman is one of most powerful people in the world of Linux, second only to his buddy Linus Torvalds, it s creator. It s Kroah Hartman s job to maintain what s known as the stable branch of Linux, that s the one deployed in data centers around the world. Before working full time for the Linux Foundation, he worked on Novell s version of Linux, known as SUSE. Like Torvalds, Kroah Hartman has his share of fans and groupies young open source developers who want to grow up to be just like him. He s an author and popular public speaker, too.

One of the hottest big data startups is Roman Stanek s GoodData. In 2012 it increased revenue five fold, and closed 40 six figure deals. It now boasts 8,000 clients, including GE, Pandora, and Time Warner Cable. GoodData s investors include Andreessen Horowitz and famed technology analyst/conference organizer Esther Dyson. It s raised over $75 million from investors to date. Stanek is a good bet. He s started more than five companies and is best known for founding NetBeans, sold to Sun Microsystems in 1999, and Systinet, sold to Mercury Interactive in 2006 for $105 million.