The Most Influential Global Indians in Technology: Dataquest's Top 20

Arent there enough lists already? Why another? That was the first question that greeted us, when a few of us excitedly started narrating the idea to some colleagues in our marketing department. And, it was a very spontaneous response. Not a great compliment sure, but it made us think. No matter how excited you are about the uniqueness of your work, you can expect the fair share of this scepticism. And unless you settle that, it is indeed yet another list. A list is a list is a list.

That is why this a mechanical part that often goes as a box in small print, in these kind of works, with titles How We Did It or very often simply Methodology, comes right at the top. If you can appreciate it, we are fairly hopeful you will appreciate the entire work.

It is yet another list of successful Indians abroad-that you keep seeing everywhere, both Indian and non-Indian magazines, websites and television. A general interest magazine would cover people from all walks of life; a Forbes or Fortune would restrict it to business; and it is but natural that Dataquest would restrict it to technology, which, by the way, accounts for a big chunk of any such list.

But beyond that, what?

Honestly, it did not start that way. We started from the opposite end. We were trying to compile a list of people who are shaping up the technology business today-beyond the first generation successful entrepreneurs, CEO and visionaries: High profile CEOs from IBM and HP or founders such Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Larry Page.

But two things happened. We found that it was an exercise that was a little too big for us to do anything meaningful out of it. But more than that, we discovered that many of those people who occupy the most important positions, where they can influence, where technology heads in the next few years are Indians. It is not just senior positions. You can be the CFO or head the most important geography for your company and can do great things for your company. But influencing technology business globally is a completely different matter.

But then, you can be in charge of building the technology roadmap for the most well-known enterprise software company. Such as Vishal Sikka, the first-ever CTO of SAP. Or Thomas Kurian, in charge of product roadmap of Oracle, the company with broadest range of software-and now hardware-

products. And then, there is the low profile president at Microsoft, who is driving Microsofts most important future bet-cloud, in the form of Satya Nadella. Someone about whom not too much is known to many in Microsoft India, outside his division.

In fact, it is this discovery that aroused the Indianness within us. And the idea of this list was born. So, it is not celebration of Indians that we started with. That was the end result. But once we zeroed in on the influencing part, how could we have ignored a gentleman whose words are followed in Twitter by some of these big executives themselves. Such as Om Malik. And those who are doing the same, but not exactly in public glare-such as Dilip Wagle of McKinsey.

So, we tweaked it a bit. And the moment the influencing and Indian parts were juxtaposed, how could you ignore some just because they are already CEOs? Of course, we looked at only those CEOs who are in charge of companies that are uniquely positioned to influence how technology business evolves, such as Adobe or Motorola Mobility.

And we have a list of 20 such people.

So, the perspective with which you need to look at the list is this: This is a list of Indians who are in a position to influence how technology and technology business will shape up in the next few years. While that was not a filter for us, it just happens to be the case that most of them are in their 40s and 30s. They are young. So, if many of them happen to take up CEO positions in the next few years, you can think of us, though we are not exactly telling you so.

The other way of telling you what this is all about is to use the principle of Neti, Neti (Not This, Not This): What this list is not.

This is NOT a list of Indians in top positions in technology companies, though it looks like one. There are Googlers who are not necessarily among the senior most people in their company. There are quite a few SVPs in Cisco. And quite a few of them happen to be Indian. If there is one who stands out, it is because of her responsibility within the company as well as her following in social media, a direct influencing medium. And of course, as outlined earlier, there are a few who are NOT part of any technology company.

There are a few important notes to the list.

• Those Indians who have contributed in the past but are no more active do not feature in the list, because their actions cannot influence the current and future trends. The only two who are veterans but still feature in the list are there because they are still influencing how technology business shapes up. Those two gentlemen are Vyomesh Joshi and Vinod Khosla.
• There is no one from the service industry. That is not because we consciously excluded them. But they have a little higher odds against them. While an individual with a senior position in the services industry can still be an influencer, that is not by being virtue of occupying an important strategic role for his company and doing it well (as say in the case of a software company). It has to be going beyond his job role and doing something outside, like say, by being an active technology blogger or bringing about a fundamental change in how business is done. We did not find any such individual.
• While we did look at resident Indians, we did not find anyone who is influencing techology business globally-enough to feature in a list of 20. There are quite a few who belong to the first category-they have already done that but are not in a position to do that now.
• To summarize, the list is not prepared with the idea of celebrating the success of Indians. Rather, it identifies those Indians whose action we need to keep watching.

The Unity and the Diversity

As pointed above, one thing is strikingly common among those in the list. Many of them are young and have some time to make their influence count. As many as 13 of them are either in their 30s or 40s. And as many as 16 of them are 51 or less. Before you doubt if that is young enough, take this. A lot of them-including Thomas Kurian, Satya Nadella, and Vishal Sikka, the three men who represent the three largest software companies in this list-are all the youngest in their peer group, within their own company. Vinod Khosla may be 56.

But even at that age, he is one of the youngest legends in the valley.

Three of them are in their 30s. While the age of Sundar Pichai of Google is not too much of a surprise, the other two are actually two gentlemen who have already made a mark in the government domain-the ex federal CIO Vivek Kundra and the federal CTO Aneesh Chopra. While Kundra is getting ready for preaching what he practised, in his second innings as the EVP in charge of emerging markets of Salesforce-the announcement about which inducted him to the list at the last moment-Chopra, the only second generation Indian in the list-born in New Jersey-is still driving the government agenda. And they go from a country where, even today, you cannot be anyone in the government unless you are 55. That is almost a qualification!

Not surprisingly, most of them are engineers. And many from IITs. Interestingly, no single IIT dominates. IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee and IT BHU all figure in the list of alma maters of these achievers. But there are a good number of people from the other colleges too: MS University, Osmania, and Manipal. The sole non-engineer in the list comes from St Stephens, Delhi. He, in fact, is the odd one out. A journalist turned blogger, he is actually one of the few in the list who have actually worked in India for some time.

Then, there are the socially active and the not-so-active. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco CTO, with more than a million followers on Twitter takes the prize here. We must admit that was a factor-though not the only one-which put her on this list, from among the dozen odd SVPs in Cisco, a good number of whom are Indian. The fact that she is in charge of a function that the company is identified with was of course, the other and bigger reason. Om Malik, not so surprisingly, is a close second on that account. Some in the list are fairly less active with less than thousand followers. At least one does not use Twitter.

The Companies That Keep (Them)

There are companies that have significant number of Indians. And then, there are ones with significant number of Indians at senior positions.

Microsoft and Google have both. In the flat organization structure that Google has, it is often importance and not seniority that matter. And Google has a number of Indians in important positions. Dataquest actually did a story on that last year. Google also is the only company to have three of its people feature in the list of 20. That is 15%. Microsoft has a few at the next level. But Satya Nadella, who features in this list, is at the absolute top level. Two companies who are less vocal about the number of Indians that they have on top are Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Oracle follows them.

IBM, which probably (it now does not comment on that) has more people in India than in the US, does not have a single top executive who is Indian and is the only significant tech company that is missing from this list.

How to Use The List

As clarified earlier, this list is not a celebration of Indian success but a pointer to who are the people who are influencing the way technology business (and technology itself) is shaping up. These are the people who need to be watched for their action. As many of the are young, they may take up bigger and bigger roles. If you create a list of Indian CEOs in technology in 2017, it would not be a bad idea to check with this list. n

The Turnaround Man

Abhi Talwalkar has a passion for fast cars. He has owned a Porsche Cayenne Turbo S and a Mercedes-Benz AMG CL 55. He is the kind of guy who makes the most out of the rubber meeting the road...and brings the same passion to work as well.

LSI, his company, has got a lot of legacy in the semiconductor industry; it dominated the consumer space till 2005. The mid 2000s saw the fortunes of the semiconductor industry sway wildly, as many companies struggled to survive. LSI went deep in the red. The company's board took a difficult call to replace its founder, Wilfred Corrigan, and placed its bets on the industry (and ex-Intel) veteran Abhijit Talwalkar in 2005. Talwalkar was seen as the turnaround guy, and his actions do speak louder than his words.

In just 4 years he steadied the company, bringing back investors' confidence in a company which was at the 'brink of disaster' in 2005. How did Talwalkar achieve this feat? The answer lies in the evolutionary shift in the focus that he brought in. He ended the company's long-term domination in the consumer market and concentrated on storage and networking, and the chips that went inside. This has clicked really well as the world gets increasingly connected and data grows by leaps and bounds, putting storage devices in the limelight.

Talwalkar has indeed played the role of an 'acceleration officer' at LSI as he changes the very fabric of the company by leveraging on its competencies and applying them to new and emerging domains. As per analysts, Talwalkar brought in a 'strategic cohesiveness' to the business lines by phasing out non-productive ones with ones that have a good market yield. He is believed to have been a strong contender for AMD CEO's role.

In Search of Excellence

Just imagine the internet without Google. And Google without search. That will give an indication of the importance of being Amit Singhal. He is the man behind the 2001 revamp of Google search algorithm. Before Singhal chiselled Google search, it used to take anywhere from 15 to 45 days to find a newly posted page or news. Now, courtesy Singhal and his team, users have nearly instant access to websites and blog posts.

Today, Singhal runs Google's core search quality department and along with his team, is responsible for the Google search algorithms. His feat is well-recognized by The New York Times, which acknowledged Singhal as the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm". It was in 1990 when Singhal got interested in the problem of search. After getting a PhD in 1996, Amit joined AT&T Labs (previously a part of Bell Labs), where he continued his research in information retrieval, speech retrieval, and other related fields. It was in the year 2000 that he was persuaded by his friend Krishna Bharat to join Google. Google also did not hold back from rewarding their star engineer for rewriting algorithms and bestowed upon him the title of Google Fellow, an honorary title reserved for Google's most accomplished engineers. The acclaim does not stop there. In 2011, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In addition, a volley of titles from various publications like India Abroad magazine, Fortune, and others stand as a testimony to his feat.

Born in Jhansi, Singhal received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee in 1989 and later continued education in the US where he received an MS Degree from the University of Minnesota Duluth in 1991.

The Achiever

The second Indian to be part of the Obama administration, Aneesh Paul Chopra is the first Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the United States. What brings the 39-year-old geek to our list is his ability and influence in the tech world at such a young age. His ability to facilitate collaboration between technologists for public good is a well-known fact. They say that he even writes his emails in binary code. Undoubtedly, behind him becoming the Federal CTO, there lies a complete background that recommended him to the coveted honor in the Obama administration, where he was to advance the president's technology agenda by fostering new ideas and encouraging government-wide coordination to help the country meet its goals from job creation, to reducing healthcare costs, to protecting the homeland.

Chopra's track record of handling various government and non-government positions enabled him to become the top CTO in the world. Mainly, his immediate past in which he had the chance to first serve as MD with the Advisory Board Company, a publicly-traded healthcare think tank, and second as secretary of technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia from January 2006 until April 2009, contributed to his candidature. In addition, Chopra was not an unknown name when Obama chose to make him the CTO. His influence was well recognized when he was named to Government Technology magazine's Top 25 in their Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers issue in 2008. On December 9, 2009, episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Chopra was featured in a segment and was called the 'Indian George Clooney' by the host.

Born in 1972 in Trenton, New Jersey, the eldest son of Ram and Neelam Chopra, Aneesh Chopra received his BA from The Johns Hopkins University and his MPP from Harvard Kennedy School.

Investing in the Future

The unassuming and soft-spoken Arvind Sodhani heads one of the world's biggest venture funds-Intel Capital-that has invested more than $10 bn in 1,100 companies in 48 countries since its inception in 1991. Sodhani was instrumental in making Intel Capital one of the world's most successful investor with a focus on start-ups. He has an uncanny ability to identify some of the best innovative start-ups and a good return run rate. While more than half of the funding has happened from outside of the US, the fund, by consolidating 24 VC firms in the US, has pledged close to $3.5 bn for the 'Invest in America' program as well.

Over the last one year, one of the significant things Intel did was the announcement of 2nd Generation Core family of processors and launch of a new category of ultra-slim form factor Notebook under the Ultrabook brand. To evolve this concept into a form factor, Intel Capital announced a $300 mn Ultrabook fund to establish the platform and to hand hold with PC OEMs. Sodhani remarked in a statement: "The Intel Capital Ultrabook fund will focus on investing in companies, which are building technologies that will help revolutionize the computing experience and morph today's mobile computers into the next 'must have' devices."

In fact, with his focus on innovation, Sodhani has played a key role in shaping the Ultrabook market, popularizing Ultrabooks in 2011, and setting the stage for making the platform more mature. Moreover, recently, he made another significant announcement: The AppUp fund via Intel Capital mandates to invest $100 mn in companies in the realm of developing digital content for multiple devices. Clearly, under Sodhani's shadow, Intel is empowering tech entrepreneurs by giving them the much-needed financial muscle.

The Sole Jnana Yogi

In the midst of mostly men and a solitary woman of action, Dilip Wagle, director, McKinsey, who helps technology and media companies formulate strategies and execute them, stands out as a man of knowledge. He is full-time into observing, analyzing, strategizing on technology business, and is a recognized thought leader. His article on software as a service, is one of the earliest authoritative work and was used by companies for a long time. His another popular article is High Tech: Finding Opportunities in the Downturn.

Wagle's clientele varied from large to small, hardware to software, technology providing firms to ISVs. He is an expert in strategy, organization design, enterprise, consumer and operations, etc.

He guided many software firms in developing SaaS strategies. He also helped a global firm to not only build technology, but develop a talent identification and management architecture. And apart from Saas, his advices and guidance on cloud, ERP, etc, are most sought after, as they set the tone of the IT budgets for many companies.

A known name from the alumnus list of IITB, Wagle switched just once in his entire stint of more than 20 years. He started with Microsoft. Today, he is called the leader in high-tech practice. He has not only been consulting and guiding, but has also played a key role in research initiatives and Mckinsey quarterly reports. He has also written many books and thought-provoking articles on varied topics-opportunities for high-tech industry in downturn and privatization and the world bank.

On the Hot Seat

What happens when the worlds collide? This was the question Arora posed to the audience at last year's Monaco Media Forum. As the audience pondered, Arora touched upon a string of trends on how this generation, sitting in the midst of a tech evolution, has seen the blurring of lines between 'what was' to 'what is'. In that progression, he made a startling prediction that 'internet will collide with TV' in a pervasive form and moving forward, IPTV would become the new norm.

Predicting the future may be a marketing tool for some executives in the industry, but for Nikesh Arora, chief business officer, Google, that is the basic expectation everyone has from him. Who else would know better than Google, where things are moving on the net? And as the person in the hot seat (there is the chairman, there are the founders, and then, there is this young Indian), his is the first Indian surname that you notice in a company, where almost every second business is headed by an Indian.

Nikesh Arora has donned mostly sales and marketing roles; yet he sounds like someone who is in complete control when it comes to technology.

And he is one of the few people who know Google inside out and his influence on the company becomes evident from the fact that he is almost on all the earnings calls Google does and is most sought-after by analysts.

Arora is also aggressively taking on to and driving the 'What's Next' evolution in search and talks about convergence of media, form factors, and user-relevant on-demand content. He has openly said that Google is not only about search; rather it strives to provide what users want. A frequent visitor to India, Arora, according to grapevine, was a top candidate for the position of Yahoo!'s CEO.

Full-time Influencer

Delhi-born Om Perkash Malik, the only one in our list whose day job is 'influencing', is popular among the 2.0 generation without his middle name and also for running GigaOM. As per the Technorati ranking, GigaOM, which recently turned 10, ranks among the top 20 blogs globally and top 10 in IT. GigaOM also runs a research service for paid customers called GigaOM Pro.

Malik's influence is not indirect, unlike many in our list. His Twitter followers number 1.3 mn (For comparison, that is a little less than Amitabh Bachchan's and a little more than Shashi Tharoor's), which includes the who's who in IT. While his first love is gadgets and broadband, he often writes about all areas in technology. In 2007, he famously said that Facebook was in trouble.

Even when he was a student in Delhi, he had started writing for magazines. Before founding GigaOM, he worked in India Abroad, Business 2.0, Forbes.com, and Red Herring. A journalist-turned-investor-turned-full-time blogger, Malik is a regular podcaster, now mostly as a guest but earlier also as a host. Apart from his blog, he writes for various newspapers and journals. Malik has also penned down a book titled Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist.

Also, he is probably the only one in this list who is not from an IIT or an engineering college. Actually, Malik is an alumnus of St Stephen's (Chemistry Honors, of all things) College in Delhi, who loves clothes and gadgets. Although 4 years back he suffered a heart attack, but recovered smartly to keep influencing the tech world.

The Social Influencer

In terms of pure hierarchy, Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's chief technical officer, is not in the same league as many others in the list. She is also one of the half a dozen Indians at that level, within Cisco. In our list, Warrior stands out for her social influence. She has one of the highest number of followers among tech people on Twitter-more than 1.5 mn. That would probably make her the number #1 tech woman on Twitter.

And, she happens to handle the most important job in Cisco, a company which according to critics does only technology and PR, leaving everything else to partners. She has been instrumental in identifying 3 key trends for Cisco: Video, collaboration, and virtualization, on which Cisco product innovation revolves. It was rumored that she was a strong contender for the federal CTO's role. While her role at Cisco is well defined, what makes her different is her effective translation of Cisco's philosophy 'creating solutions for the connected world'.

Unlike many others, she is a direct influencer of tech trends, through her tweets, while creating a cutting-edge technology for her company. Rising to great heights at Motorola where she started her career in 1984 after graduating with masters in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University, she has been a communication tech evangelist from the beginning. Her concept of 'seamless mobility' was way ahead of times. Her uncanny ability to see through the technology haze and create new products and marketing opportunities enabled her to constantly soar in her career. In 2004, she got the US President's medal of technology.

In the male-dominated tech world, Warrior stands out: From the dusty town of Vijayawada in AP to IIT Delhi to the technology epicenter-the Bay Area-Warrior has come a long way. Her ability to seamlessly combine her work and her communication is what would be most essential in the leaders of tomorrow.

Searching for Answers

When Prabhakar Raghavan is not cracking complex algorithms at the coveted Yahoo! Labs, the chances are that one might bump into him in any of his favorite places-the Mena House Hotel in Giza, the 'son et lumiere' show in front of the pyramids, or inside the dome at St Peter, where he likes climbing or having Yemeni food in a restaurant in Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem. The list goes on...

It does sound like he is working for Lonely Planet but a closer look at his resume shows his impeccable academics and professional credentials-IIT Chennai, PhD from UC Berkley, and head of Yahoo! Labs. While Yahoo! is in the midst of key transition with top-level attritions, the company is betting big on veterans like Prabhakar to challenge and compete with the folks at Mountain View. Prabhakar took over as head of Yahoo! Labs, created in 2005, with mandate to redefine search in many different ways, to create new opportunities for Yahoo!, and to take competition head on. Under the leadership of Prabhakar, Yahoo! has launched many significant initiatives. The notable one last year was its new search tool called the 'Search Direct'. In one of the earlier interviews with Dataquest, Prabhakar said, "The rationale behind search direct is that searchers do not usually care about thousands of results out of every search query. They are looking at relevant user-specific queries and not generic ones. Search direct is the next step in offering specific answers to the users search queries."

Prabhakar, by using his rich academic background, has fused those theoretical techniques into new concepts that has redefined Yahoo! search and has given the competitive edge. He is also instrumental in the India R&D initiatives, which has around 2,000 people and is the 2nd largest facility for Yahoo!. He is also involved in some path-breaking projects.

Top Tech Man @ Top Tech Co

At the age of 51, leading the research initiative of any technology company can be challenging and doing that for the world's largest and most diversified technology company is something that few would dare to do. Unlike sales and marketing, few would give in to exuberance over experience. As the SVP of research at HP and director of HP Labs, Prith Banerjee is the eyes and vision of the company. Apart from heading the labs, his core job is to look into the future of technology 5-10 years ahead from now and build products that make HP relevant and remain competitive in a dynamic world.

Recipient of several awards and accreditations, writer of around 300 research papers, Banerjee is a big name in the academia-prior to HP, he served as dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. But his entry into the industry not only created ripples in HP but also in the media. When Banerjee joined HP labs, he called for a total restructuring in the division, which is talked about even today. He challenged the concept of research for scientific experiments and learning versus research with a commercially-viable approach. He consolidated the then 150 teams of 1-2 (person) team size in 20 teams (or as they internally call as research themes) with 10-30 members each, each focused on one area such as print and content delivery, mobility and immersive experience, cloud and security, information and analytics, intelligent infrastructure, research on networking communication, services and sustainability, and so on.

While the industry is talking about information explosion today, his team is already busy working on big bet projects. He has been working on developing IPs around cloud security, seamless transfer from public to private cloud, maintaining a balance between personal and enterprise device, rich user interface, etc.

The latest innovation from HP Labs was project Moonshot, range of the greenest servers, that helped raise the benchmark platform for the industry and take HP's ISS to a new realm altogether.

The Strategist with a Vision

When Sanjay Jha took over as the CEO of Motorola Mobility, the company was in a really bad shape. It needed a master technologist and manager like him to steady the sinking ship. He made radical changes in the product portfolio and shifted to the Android platform. This strategy reflected on the products, and Motorola started making Android smartphones like the Milestone and more recently the Android based tablets-RAZR and XOOM. In 2011, under Jha's stewardship, Motorola was competing on a level playing ground with Apple, HTC, and Samsung. Jha was also instrumental in Google's acquisition of Motorola's mobility business in late 2011.

One of the significant things Jha did last year was creating a tablet strategy for enterprises and aggressively popularizing the concept of 'consumerization of the enterprise'. In line with that, Motorola recently launched ET1, the world's first enterprise-grade tablet, with an application development framework called Motorola RhoElements and a whole lot of vertical-specific features with enhanced security. In 2012, Jha is betting big on Motorola tablets.

Another differentiated approach that Jha adopted was not flooding the market with Motorola smartphones too often like its close competitors do. He believes that each phone has its life cycle and its potential needs to be leveraged fully.

As a tech influencer, he is redefining Android adoption by co-creating a brand perception that despite Android's openness and vendors' freehand in making their own UI, remains the most innovative mobile platform. And with vendors' efforts they can add a whole lot of enterprise-class features. That's what Google is also looking at-transforming Android into a more robust and secure OS .

First among Equals

It is not trivia info that Satya Nadella, who is all of 43, is the youngest among Microsoft's top leadership. Steve Ballmer surely needed someone who has age by his side to lead the business unit that will be instrumental in driving Microsoft to where it wants to be (dominate, right?) in the next few years. Windows and Office may be its 2 top business units by revenue, but that is past. Nadella, as the president of the Servers and Tools Business (STB), is clearly the man incharge of the future. That business is already the company's fastest growing and most profitable.

But that is not why he is one of the most influential persons in the IT industry today. What makes him immensely important is that he is the man responsible for making cloud work-not just for Microsoft but for the world at large-beyond server rentals and SaaS; and he seems to be succeeding to some extent. It is difficult to talk about cloud with more certainty than that.

He has a track record. He has already done that with the Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS). But there, Microsoft was the challenger and it was a question of taking market share. Here, it is a little more than that. It is about being on top of something evolving and taking charge. His every step is analyzed and scrutinized. But this Hyderabad boy, with an engineering degree from Mangalore and MS and MBA from Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago, respectively, is not new to that either. Before this assignment he was heading online engineering. And when he was moved to this division-resulting in fellow Indian Amitabh Srivastava's quitting-many analysts pointed out that Bing needed him. But as Ballmer has shown now, he needed Nadella for something bigger.

Designers' Choice

Trying to defend your leadership when your top challenger is Microsoft is tough. But having a public spat with the God of small (and not so small) things such as iPod and iPad is unimaginable. Unless you are Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe. When Jobs accused that Flash crashed on Apple, Narayen famously said, "That has something to do with the Apple operating system." Many believe that this was one of the reasons that helped Android.

Adobe is a company that is one of its kind. Developers and designers swear by its name. Handling customers, who are loyal and demanding at the same time, can be the toughest thing for a CEO. But Narayen has effectively managed to do that.

In late 2007, Narayen was promoted from COO to CEO, at a time when Adobe had already attained market leadership. He had to defend that, as Microsoft CEO soon publicly said that Silverlight was their most important product. After 3 years, Adobe is still going strong. In late 2010, there were reports that Microsoft was seriously considering buying the company. But its valuation probably was a little too high.

In 2009, Narayen also took a seemingly radical step of acquiring Omniture, arguably the best web based analytics tool, though that looks very logical now. For Narayen, it was the most perfect fit. If Adobe was the most preferred tool for creating the web, Narayen thought it was incomplete without the analytics of an actual user behavior. The combination is a winner.

Another mark of Narayen's influence is that he is
part of the US President's Management Advisory
Board. No wonder he is one of the top paid CEOs in corporate America.

The King in the Making

Going by analysts' predictions, this year will see Google Chrome overtaking Internet Explorer (IE) to become the No #1 browser. And, the credit for this goes to Sundar Pichai, SVP of Chrome at Google. Beating IE is no child's play, but Pichai and his team made it possible through multiple innovations like making it faster (relatively), sharing the source code (hence engaging more developer community), and staying ahead with innovations (like introducing tabs, auto form fill, web apps), and many more. It's the philosophy of Google of wowing the customer and the seamless integration with the web that made Chrome take away the share.

Even though there are many worthy Indians in Google, which is known for its high density of Indians, Pichai's achievements make him stand out and join the big boss Nikesh Arora in this exclusive list. It's believed that Twitter was trying hard to poach him. A Google employee since 2004, Pichai has worked on many products like iGoogle, Google Toolbar, Google Pack,

Google Desktop, etc, but the 2 major products, Google Chrome and Chrome OS, are what made him indispensable for Google. While Android came to Google from its acquisition, Pichai was already working on Chrome OS, an operating system for the PC. According to him, Chrome OS was for web-browsing across all form factors (starting with medium form factors like Netbooks called as Chromebooks) and carried its own importance.

It is said that if Google was to pay its employees on the basis of revenues generated by an individual product along with an equity attached to it, then at 39, Pichai would have become one of the richest persons out there.

A Strategic Rise

The first among equals among Larry's boys, Thomas Kurian is among the 10-odd EVPs in Oracle but ask any analyst attending Oracle Open World whose session in Oracle he/she waits for most eagerly after Ellison's, the answer invariably would be Kurian's. As the person in charge of its product roadmap, he arguably plays the most 'strategic' role within Oracle, which has the broadest range of products in the industry: Enterprise apps, vertical apps, database. middleware, systems software, and now a piece of hardware and the likes of database machines. He got noticed when he rapidly scaled up Oracle's application server business to make it a serious middleware player, in a very short period, about a decade back. Since then, his rise has been both steady and fast.

Today, Kurian is not just responsible for taking the call on the future of all these 3,000 odd existing products, but on what to add-and by extension, Oracle's future acquisitions-that makes him one of the most influential persons in the industry when it comes to the software side.

The fact that he is just 44 means he will continue to do that for some time to come-within or outside Oracle. What is not so well known is that this young, comparatively low-profile executive is one of the highest paid in corporate America, drawing more than many CEOs who feature regularly among the highest paid CEOs' list.

Going by his own assessment, cloud, standardized data centers, and easier manageability are going to be the key aspects in the future, and those are his current priorities.

Past, Present, and Future

This isnt a list celebrating what Indians have contributed to the world of technology, but identifying those individuals who are influencing the world of technology today-meaning those who can still influence and bring forth changes. Vinod Khosla, already a celebrity in the technology world, is here not because he founded Sun Microsystems or had the guts to challenge 2 monopolies-Intel and Cisco-by creating 2 strong competitors: AMD and Juniper Networks. Unlike many other Indians who have contributed immensely to the world of technology in the past but have faded, Khosla is still immensely influential. His Khosla Ventures has investments in more than 40 IT companies, which include companies in services, semiconductor, devices, systems, online/social media, productivity, advertising, and cloud.

With his company raising more than a billion dollar recently to fund in the areas of traditional IT, internet, mobile, and cleantech, he is still going strong. One of the oldest among those featuring in this list, Kholsa is the past, present, and future-all rolled into one. In fact, he is, in a way, the connection between the past and the future of technology.

An alumnus of IIT Delhi with an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Khosla is a founding board member of the Indian School of Business. Still one of the most respected VCs in the valley, Khoslas other interests include social entrepreneurship, specifically microfinance as a means of poverty alleviation. He is actively involved in many MFIs in India and Africa.

Die Indie

It is more than hundred years back that German scholar Max Muller wrote, India: What Can It Teach Us? Today, the most well-known enterprise software company, headquartered in Germany (probably the only major IT company based outside the US and India), is using some of that knowledge effectively, by putting an Indian in charge of its product and technology roadmap. Vishal Sikka, still in his 40s, is SAPs first ever Indian CTO. Hasso Plattner, SAPs co-founder too was in his early 40s, when he launched SAPs flagship R/3.

Despite SAPs leadership, Sikka, like a true visionary, thinks that you need to disrupt rather than patch. The IT industry has focused on too much repackaging and reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lower the costs of integrated systems. In reality, this rebundling increases the clutter that already exists in enterprise landscapes. It is time for a rethink, he says boldly. Coming from a leader, and that too a European company, that is radical, to say the least.

One of the major contributions in Sikkas SAP career so far is the launch of SAP HANA-the companys new in-memory computing appliance that fuses SAP software with a pre-configured hardware cutting across server, storage and networking and is touted as the next big thing for SAP since the launch of its R/3. HANA was Sikkas brainchild and in the virtualized cloud environment and on-demand delivery, HANA is expected to redefine transactional as well as analytical data processing. Sikkas efforts have led to the fructification of SAP River-a cloud platform for building light weight simple apps. In short, he is driving a product renaissance.

As a leader, beyond his technology planning role, he is also the sponsor of SAP Labs India and is directly involved in leveraging Indias capability more effectively and seamlessly within SAP.

Megha Doota

As Federal CIO, he brought in efficiency, drove projects with clinical precision and saved millions of dollars. While the world was debating cloud, he went ahead aggressively to embrace cloud for the federal government. He kept championing the cause of cloud whenever he got a chance. While everything was going well, with president Obama publicly lauding his efforts, he left, only to re-emerge as an official champion of cloud-in the cloud company, Salesforce.com.

As EVP in charge of emerging markets, he would champion cloud and would get the ears of most of the governments as he has literally 'been there, done that'. To that extent, he would influence how cloud takes off globally. Kundra is now seen as an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing. Apart from using cloud for building governmental efficiency, Kundra, who was the Federal CIO from March 2009 to August 2011, is credited for strengthening the cyber-security posture in the US and launching an open government movement. As the first CIO of the US, Kundra managed more than $80 bn in technology investments and has also authored the 'Cloud-First' policy, which now serves as a model for government IT organizations around the world seeking to increase efficiencies with less resources.

In March 2011, the World Economic Forum selected Kundra as a Young Global Leader for his professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. Before his tenure as the US CIO, Kundra served as chief technology officer for the District of Columbia and as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Born in 1974 in New Delhi and brought up in the US, Kundra earned a masters degree in IT from University of Maryland University College. Kundra loves to read, travel, and watch movies. Like most Indians, his favorite movie is Sholay and favorite book is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

Power CEO

It's the passion to excel and steer ahead that makes an individual like Vivek Ranadiv an inspiration for others. Ranadiv, chairman and CEO, TIBCO Software, is a well-known thought leader and an author whose books-The Power of Now and The Power to Predict-have been widely used in the academia and industry. The Power of Now has been enlisted in The New York Times' Business Bestseller list. In 2004, Information Age in its August 10 issue described him as 'a true visionary in a valley full of seers'.

Born in 1957 in Mumbai, Ranadiv had a dream of studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he had learned about through a documentary. At the age of 17 he left Mumbai to accomplish his cherished dream, with very little money, not enough to survive in the US. In 1975, he entered MIT where he first earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and then a master's degree in mechanical engineering.

Also, there is a history behind him setting up TIBCO Software. Ranadiv started Teknekron Software Systems (TSS) where he developed the Information Bus through which he integrated and delivered market data like stock quotes and other financial information for banks and other financial institutions. In 1994, Teknekron got acquired by Reuters Group PLC, which continued to develop TIBCO Software and expanded its use in the financial services markets. In January 1997, he established TIBCO Software as a separate entity to create and market software solutions for use in the integration of business information, processes, and applications outside the financial services sector.

Besides, Ranadiv was the president and founder of a UNIX consulting company and has also worked with Ford Motor Company, M/A-Com Linkabit, and Fortune Systems.

Changing Perceptions

What surprises and impresses the industry is how, despite the digitalization of content, Vyomesh I Joshi, EVP, imaging and printing group, HP, remained optimistic about the need and demand for paper, and continued evangelizing about it. This is perhaps one of the major reasons why HP retained its leadership position in the IPG domain for many years.

VJ, as he is popularly known, found his place on the top tech influencers list. This is because of his acumen that not only took HP's printing business from $19 bn to $26 bn as of today, but also for bringing home a profitable business. In other words, in today's scenario, where vanilla hardware is getting commoditized forcing companies to work on wafer-thin margins, he introduced various business models and solutions that maintained the health of the bottom-line.

Vyomesh influenced HP to start focusing on software and solutions, including hardware and supplies. As a result, while HP, as a company, was getting attention for wrong reasons, its HP IPG story was gaining accolades. Thanks to VJ. In his capacity, VJ partnered in disrupting the printing business; converting it from vanilla printing to content consumption business. The examples were the acquisition of snapfish that enabled photo-editing, retail photo-printing, evolution of e-printing or web-printing, etc. In fact, it won't be an exaggeration to say that VJ played a major role in changing the perception that IPG is not only about paper, ink and toner.

HP has been the only company he worked for after his engineering from Ohio State. He joined this business unit around the 1980s, when they were just building it from scratch. At 56, he is front-ending newer concepts and business models-Print 2.0, on-demand printing, and HP's latest 3D printing, which not only paves new ways for inkjet technology but also illustrates his visionary quotient, which is being replicated by rivals to stay in the market.