Interoperability's own General Patton

Fred Wettling, a top network executive for Bechtel, has a knack for rallying the troops around his favorite standards cause, the Network Applications Consortium.

For relaxation, Fred Wettling zigzags his Yamaha sport-touring motorcycle along a serpentine stretch of North Carolina Highway 129 known as the Tail of the Dragon.

The 11-mile route, stuffed accordion-like into 318 corners with such names as Hog Pen, Little Whip and Gravity Cavity, is as much a spiritual recharge as it is a metaphor for Wettling's IT career - a journey filled with twists and turns where he's always been at the controls with his hand on the throttle.

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Midwestern influence Leading by example Vital stats 50 most powerful people in networking

For relaxation, Fred Wettling zigzags his Yamaha sport-touring motorcycle along a serpentine stretch of North Carolina Highway 129 known as the Tail of the Dragon.

The 11-mile route, stuffed accordion-like into 318 corners with such names as Hog Pen, Little Whip and Gravity Cavity, is as much a spiritual recharge as it is a metaphor for Wettling's IT career - a journey filled with twists and turns where he's always been at the controls with his hand on the throttle.

As infrastructure architect for San Francisco global engineering and construction firm Bechtel, Wettling dissects the future and extracts the technology that drives the company forward. A self-taught computer fanatic, he also chairs the Network Applications Consortium (NAC), a small group of like-minded network executives from corporate giants such as Bechtel, Boeing, Disney and Nike that promotes integration, interoperability and vendor collaboration.

The NAC politely pins big-boy vendors such as Cisco, IBM and Microsoft up against the schoolyard fence and convinces them to play nice. "The level of trust and the competence we've established in the NAC allows us to exert our influence," says Wettling, who joined the group in 1997 after wandering into a meeting to check out the agenda. "It's something individual members couldn't do on their own."

Midwestern influence

The NAC's gentle-but-determined influence mirrors Wettling's powerbroker style. He gets General-Patton-like results using a warm smile, a firm handshake and a knack for rallying the troops.

The 56-year-old, an amateur ham radio operator and sculptor of bonsai trees, attributes that style to his Midwest upbringing during the 1950s and early 1960s by a father who worked as a human resources manager and a mother who sold real estate and dabbled in amateur theater. "I inherited it from my folks, who were easy to get along with," he says.

Wettling says moves between Iowa, Illinois and Minnesota as a child and four schools between the ninth and 12th grades gave him the skill to thrive on change.

"Part of my approach is to talk to people about what is important to them. It's getting organizations engaged; it's getting people engaged. Part of success is getting people to share in that success," he says, citing the NAC as one example.

He started as an accounting major at the University of Houston in 1967, left in 1969 to work in Gulf Oil's accounting department before returning to night classes at the University of Houston in 1976 and graduating in 1981 with his accounting degree. His only formal computer training was a single Fortran class, with the rest of his knowledge derived through "a lot of elbow time with experts." In turn, many now turn to him as an IT authority and subject-matter expert.

"It amazes me how much Fred knows about everything out there, every standard, every protocol, every mechanism and what is going on with them," says Mike Beach, a NAC member from Boeing.