The technology industry has always been something of a cult of personality, populated by strong characters driving their own agendas, sometimes with vested-interest results. Fortunately, it's often for the greater good. The lesson: Look for the strong characters and you'll find the emerging trends, the creative centers, the areas of opportunity. Here are our picks for the key people to watch in the coming year. There are prophets and politicos, product gurus and senior execs, denizens of the blogosphere and foresightful CIOs. Their agendas? The months ahead will tell for sure.

Academia's Adware Inquisitor Academia - Ben Edelman   Open Source Kick MuleSource - Ross Mason The Art Of Disruption VMware - Diane Greene   Alex Iskold's Startup, AdaptiveBlue, Helps The Firefox Browser Get Smarter AdaptiveBlue - Alex Iskold Splunk Takes Proactive Approach To Web Site Complexity Splunk - Michael Baum   Prediction: Hackers Will Crack The Corporate Firewall WhiteHat Security - Jeremiah Grossman Big Software Ambitions Oracle - John Wookey   TechCrunch's Arrington Stares Down The Perils Of Growth TechCrunch - Michael Arrington IBM Master Inventor Takes Cell Chip Beyond Games IBM - Michael Gschwind   Smells Like An Open Source Success Story Sourcefire - Martin Roesch Community College CIO Powers E-Learning Effort To Reach Navy Worldwide Florida Community College - Rob Rennie   Robert Howard Is Looking To Batten Down The VA Department of Veterans Affairs - Robert Howard Four People Who Will Affect Tech Policy Matters In Washington U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - John Doll   Nokia Gets To Business In Smartphones Nokia - Mary McDowell From Web 2.0 To Enterprise 2 BT Global Services - JP Rangaswami   Between An Open Source Rock And A Microsoft Hard Place Novell - Ron Hovsepian At Intel, A Repeat Performance Helps Reclaim Lost Ground Intel - Dadi Perlmutter   Digitizing The Native Tongue Hewlett-Packard - Shekhar Borgaonkar