15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference In 200815 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference In 2008

Meet 15 people who will help shape the business technology world in the coming year. They're not the usual suspects -- the names everyone knows. Several are industry and tech execs, and most are gurus, prophets, or evangelists of one sort or another. They're all passionate about an idea, an approach, or a technology, and they're focused on driving it to the next level. Watch for each of them to be a force for change in their own corner of the tech world.

InformationWeek Staff

December 14, 2007

5 Min Read

John Glaser CIO, Partners Healthcare Health-care industry skeptic, who's helping Partners take one of the toughest stances on e-records adoption	Simon Crosby CTO, Citrix Systems' Virtualization & Management Division Driven by the belief that "virtualization has got to be everywhere."
Mark Shuttleworth Founder, Ubuntu open source project and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Technologist, venture capitalist, social experimenter, philanthropist, Russian-trained space traveler, and chief backer of Ubuntu	Martin Fowler Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks Agile Development's chief evangelist
Steve Hanna Distinguished Engineer, Juniper Networks Driving force behind NAC standardization	Larry Vertal Senior Strategist, Advanced Micro Devices and Green Grid Board Member Green computing advocate who will make sure energy-efficient computing stays on every tech company's agenda
Aneel Bhusri Co-founder & President, Workday Using software-as-a-service model to put the squeeze on Big Software	Anssi Vanjoki Executive VP & GM, Nokia's Multimedia Business Unit Exec in charge of remaking Nokia into a Web services company
Jim Goodnight CEO, SAS Institute Owns the company that dominates the most important piece of the BI market-data integration and advanced analytics	Scott Abel CEO, Spiceworks Pioneered the ad-supported software
Gail Farnsley CIO, Cummins Applied Six Sigma process improvement to get the right leaders in place to support her company's future growth	Gurdeep Singh Pall Corporate VP, Microsoft's Unified Communications Group Developing new methods to communicate and collaborate via software
Rod Johnson Lead developer of Spring Framework and CEO of SpringSource, the company behind Spring Asked "why is Java so complex" and ended up with the simpler Spring Framework developer platform	Filippo Passerini Chief Information & Global Services Officer, Procter & Gamble Wants to be the "go-to" organization for all of P&G decision making
Eugene Lee CEO, Socialtext Believes enterprise wikis will free workers to be more connected and productive	No-Brainers Eight top-of-mind innovators to watch in 2008