Businesses spend a huge wad of cash every year on tech. They'll dole out $3.5 trillion in 2017 alone, according to Gartner.
The 52 most powerful people in enterprise tech in 2017
From the Atlasssian to Zoom, AI to cloud, these are the people to know in enterprise tech.
2017 has seen a dramatic increase in cloud spending and the rise of new technologies in the work place like artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.
So here's a shout-out for the 52 people shaping the multitrillion-dollar world of enterprise tech in 2017.
No. 52: Eric Yuan, cofounder & CEO, Zoom
No. 51: Rob Mee, CEO, Pivotal
No. 50: Andrew Ng, founder, Deeplearning.ai
Andrew Ng is one of the fathers of artificial intelligence as it is increasingly used by businesses.
Andrew Ng is widely known as creator of the Google Brain, Google's massive AI system that companies can access for their own apps by using Google's cloud. Ng did a shocking thing in 2014 and defected to Google's major Chinese competitor, Baidu, where he worked on AI projects there.
He left Baidu in April and is now working on a much-watched, stealth startup called Deeplearning.ai, which is undertaking the "AI transformation of our society," as Ng described.
Ng is also known as a cofounder of free online education site Coursera and he wrote one of the popular AI trainings courses of all time, teaching the next generation of AI coders.
No. 49: Neeraj Agrawal, general partner, Battery Ventures
No. 48: Jacqueline Reses, capital lead and people lead, Square
Jack Dorsey may be most famous as the CEO of Twitter but it is the other company he founded, Square, that's been skyrocketing for investors in 2017.
There are a lot of reasons for that but one of them is Jacqueline Reses, the former investment banker and former Yahoo M&A/HR queen who now works at Square.
No. 47: Bridget van Kralingen, SVP of Industry Platforms, IBM
Bridget van Kralingen has long been one of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's most trusted lieutenants.
Now Rometty has tasked her to lead two of IBM's most important initiatives, as the venerable company reboots itself into the new worlds of cloud computing and AI.
Van Kralingen is leading the "Industry Platforms" unit, charged with coming up with AI and cloud apps for individual industries, as a way to lure them onto IBM's cloud.
She's also leading IBM's foray into a young technology called "blockchain." Blockchain is a way to securely store information across many distributed computer systems and was pioneered by the online currency Bitcoin.
Blockchain has the potential to set the tech industry on fire, and IBM is known as one of the leaders of the tech, with van Kralingen at the helm.
No. 46: Adam Blitzer, EVP & GM of Sales and Service Clouds, Salesforce
Adam Blitzer is executive vice president of Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s bread and butter product.
Sales Cloud accounted for $3 billion in revenues for the company in fiscal year 2017
Blitzer first joined Salesforce in 2013 through an acquisition. He sold his B2B marketing automation company Pardot to ExactTarget in 2012 for $100 million. ExactTarget was then acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013. Now, he’s one of the most powerful people at the company and in the cloud.
No. 45: David Goeckeler, SVP & GM of Networking and Security, Cisco
No. 44: Brendan Burns, partner architect, Microsoft
Brendan Burns holds the title of partner architect at Microsoft but its his work at his former employer, Google, that's made him powerful.
While at Google, Burns created a tech called Kubernetes, one of the most popular open source projects of all time.
Kubernetes is used by programmers to manage bits of apps known as containers. Containers have changed the way programmers write apps for the cloud and Kubernetes has become a critical technology for Google as it tries to become a cloud powerhouse, challenging the likes of Amazon Web Services.
No. 43: Ryan Smith, cofounder & CEO, Qualtrics
Qualtrics offers online survey and marketing software and is a family-run business, with Ryan Smith at its helm. It was co-founded by Smith's father and a BYU professor, Scott Smith, and Smith's brother, Jared Smith, an early Google employee.
No. 42: Solomon Hykes, CTO & chief maintainer, Docker
Containers are a tech that helps programmers easily write apps for the cloud and are all the rage in enterprise tech. And Docker CTO Solomon Hykes remains the man of the hour in this niche.
Thanks to Hykes, containers have become so popular that there's a war going on between Docker and other would-be Dockers over this new container market.
This year, Docker launched a new open source community called The Moby Project, which it hopes will encourage more developers to roll up their sleeves and work on its container technology, rather than its competitors'.
It's clear that Hykes is looking to keep Docker at the center of the revolution he started.
No. 41: Nick McKeown, chief scientist & chairman, Barefoot Networks
Nick McKeown is a renowned professor at Stanford University who was one of the key people to help usher in a new way to build computer networks based on software.
He earned his wealth when his startup Nicira (cofounded with other network industry legends Martin Casado and Scott Shenker) was acquired back in 2012 for $1.2 billion. He's now quietly involved in angel investing, backing up-and-comers like SnapRoute and Kumu.
His latest startup, Barefoot Networks, is credited with being the next big disrupter in the network industry. Barefoot Networks sells an ultra-fast chip for computer networks that can be reprogrammed, allowing networks to be customized.
The company launched in June 2016 with much applause, and the market leader Cisco launched its own programmable switch just one year later in response.
No. 40: Chris Wanstrath, cofounder & CEO, Github
GitHub is the place where developers store, share and work on their apps, whether these apps are from newbie programmers or major players like Apple, IBM or Microsoft.
As a cofounder and CEO, Chris Wanstrath
No. 39: Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox
The rumor mill is spinning that Dropbox is inching closer to an IPO, which could be the biggest public offering since Snapchat.
So founder CEO Drew Houston must now grow Dropbox into a company worth big investment money.
No. 38: Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir
Palantir, known as Silicon Valley's most secretive company, choosing to keep both its data-mining technology and its client list, many of whom are government agencies, under tight wraps.
It was there at Karp floated the notion that Palantir's style of big data analysis could stop fraudulent spending in the federal government.
No. 37: Jayshree Ullal, CEO, Arista Networks
Arista Networks is taking on network industry Goliath Cisco and having a lot of success.
No. 36 & No. 35 Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, cofounders & co-CEOs, Atlassian
Meanwhile, Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes are like the Mark Zuckerbergs of their home country Australia, the youngest Australian billionaires on Forbes' 2017 list.
No: 34: Jason Taylor, VP of Infrastructure, Facebook
No. 33: Jay Parikh, VP of Infrastructure, Facebook
And
No. 32: Jeff Lawson, cofounder & CEO, Twilio
Twilio is one of the companies that secretly runs the internet: Its services let apps and websites send you text messages or make phone calls. If you've ever gotten a text from Uber saying your car is getting close, or a phone call from Netflix to verify your account, you've used Twilio.
No. 31: Aaron Levie, CEO, Box
Aaron Levie$600 million. Levie stared down investor pressure to sell and talked his board into turning down the offer.
Flash forward to 2017, and his company now has a market cap of over $2 billion. reported better-than-expected quarterly results
No. 30: Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta
Okta founder and CEO Todd McKinnon became a Wall Street darling in 2017 when he took his company public. The IPO went well, giving the company a $2 billion valuation.
Okta continued to shine after its first earnings report.
No. 29: Mike Olson, chief strategy officer, Cloudera
Big data software company Cloudera was one of the most heavily funded enterprise startups of all time, raising about
Cloudera founder, former CEO and current CSO completed the company's much-anticipated IPO in April. The stock did well in its IPO, even though the company's public valuation was half of its last private one, a market cap of about $2.5 billion.
It didn't matter. Cloudera's biggest private investor, Intel, is happy to keep its large chunk of the company. Cloudera's big data software helps Intel sell more of its chips and servers.
No. 28: Jeff Dean, senior fellow, Google
TensorFlow makes life easier for engineers looking to build machine-learning and artificially intelligent apps. That's the next big thing in enterprise tech.
Dean was an early employee at Google, and is a legend inside the company. He's created many of Google's most important products, like its first ad servers.
Today he's the head of the core AI research group, which means Dean is building the future of enterprise technology, and the future of machine learning as we know it.
No. 27: Stewart Butterfield, founder, Slack Technologies
No. 26: Ben Horowitz, VC, Andreessen/Horowitz
No. 25: Jim Goetz, VC & partner, Sequoia
WhatsApp and Palo Alto Networks.
In January, Goetz took a step back from his management responsibilities at the firm and left US operations up to his
No. 24: Aneel Bhusri, CEO, Workday
Bhusri is CEO and co-founder of Workday, the financial and human management company that is giving the old guards, SAP and Oracle, a run for their money.
The company was founded by
No. 23: Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat
No. 22: Scott Guthrie, EVP of Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft
Microsoft is betting its entire future on cloud computing, pushing its huge slate of enterprise customers to use Office 365 and its cloud service Azure.
No. 21: Thomas Kurian, president of product development, Oracle
Thomas Kurian is one of the most powerful men behind Oracle's engineering and some say that he may be the real heir to become the next CEO of Oracle, should Larry Ellison ever decide to retire.
No. 20: Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe
No. 19: Tim Cook, CEO, Apple
Perhaps Apple isn't the most obvious name in enterprise tech, but we'd be remiss if we didn't give a shout-out to CEO Tim Cook.
Cook has been working hard to push Apple deeper into the enterprise world. He's personally crafted partnerships with Cisco, Deloitte, IBM, and SAP.
And he's doing this in Apple's usual, not-so-humble way. When he was a guest star at Cisco's big tech conference in June, giving an
"We thought, looking at the enterprise, people were spending tons of money. But when you looked at the user experience, it wasn't very good. So we thought we could bring Apple's legendary ease-of-use and simplicity to the enterprise and really change the way people work."
Touché.
No. 18: Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware
No. 17: Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and chairwoman of HP
No. 16: Brian Krzanich, CEO, Intel
No. 15: Mark Hurd, co-CEO, Oracle
No. 14: Safra Catz, co-CEO, Oracle
No. 13: Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Enterprise
No. 12: Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM
No. 11: Linus Torvalds, fellow, Linux Foundation
Linus Torvalds is one of the world's most famous developers thanks to creating Linux, the operating system that rules everything from tiny devices to supercomputers, 26 years ago.
As of 2017, his life's work has won so thoroughly that its one-time arch rival Microsoft now claims that Linux makes up 33% of the virtual machine running on Microsoft Azure.
And, thanks to him and a weekend's worth of work, he created a change-management tool called Git, which has since led to an entire industry of software development startups, including the $2 billion startup Github.
No. 10: Urs Hölzle, president of Google Enterprise, Google
No. 9: Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
No 8: Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP
SAP remains the world's biggest enterprise app company and under Bill McDermott's leadership it is slowly but surely finding its way to cloud computing.
Revenues rose in the last quarter, up 10% thanks to the cloud computing.
McDermott's personal story has been a Horatio Alger tale full of incredible ups and downs. Born a working class kid, he bought his first business, a deli, at age 16. He joined SAP in 2002 and became CEO in 2014, the first American ever to run the giant German-based company.
In 2015, he lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. But nothing stops his can-do attitude. "
No. 7: Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco
No. 6: Bill Gates, founder & technology advisor, Microsoft
Although Bill Gates' is no longer at the helm of Microsoft, he continues to be heavily involved in the company as an advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and a thought-leader across the industry.
No. 5: Diane Greene, SVP of Google Cloud, Google
No. 4: Larry Ellison, CTO & chairman, Oracle
No .3: Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce
No. 2: Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
No. 1: Andrew Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services
43% bump And because AWS has been seeing so much growth since its carnation, that 43% bump was actually a slowdown.
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