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NET INFRASTRUCTURE

Charlie Giancarlo // Senior vice president and chief development officer, Cisco

This longtime Cisco star shot up even further in 2005 with yet another title added to his business card. He became chief development officer, taking over the top engineering role when Mario Mazzola retired in mid-summer. Giancarlo now oversees some 14,000 engineers, whom he'll no doubt charge with finding a product mix to make good on CEO John Chambers' promises of double-digit growth, particularly in video. Elsewhere, Giancarlo has been talking up the network's role in security and promising to deliver on another of Cisco's latest thrusts, the real-time, application-aware network.

Scott Kriens // CEO, Juniper Networks

During an October conference call, Kriens made light of the fact that enterprise product sales were up 17% quarter over quarter. "For a company looking to get into the enterprise, three-quarters of a billion dollars in business is not bad," he quipped. In all seriousness, Kriens has earned bragging rights this year for increasing enterprise sales of security and application-acceleration gear.

John McHugh // Vice president and general manager, HP ProCurve Networking

In '05, McHugh was everywhere, his presence requested at a variety of industry conferences. In mid-December, for example, he participated in an Interop Town Hall panel addressing the most important technologies for 2006. The desire for his insights is well warranted. He has led ProCurve into the No. 2 position in the Ethernet switch market, based on worldwide port shipments, according to Dell'Oro Group. McHugh wins kudos for his well-rounded enterprise strategy, which encompasses convergence, wireless LANs, WAN access and more.

Don Peterson // Chairman and CEO, Avaya

Thanks to Peterson's laser-like focus on Avaya's market niche - enterprise convergence gear - the company leads the market in various forms of IP telephony, according to multiple market research firms. With the recent acquisition of Nimcat Networks, a maker of peer-to-peer IP communications software, Peterson also has validated serverless VoIP. Peterson plans to integrate peer-to-peer phones with Avaya's other enterprise wares and use this product to push into the small and midsize business space. Watch for Peterson to move Avaya into advanced telephony tools, such as context-aware apps, speech and wireless, all key areas for the company's 2,000 researchers.

Greg Raleigh // President and CEO, Airgo Networks

Raleigh's baby, the Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO ) spec, has been called the most important wireless technology in the works. MIMO uses multiple transmitting and receiving antennas to broadcast signals faster and with more depth than traditional wireless antennas. As Raleigh awaits IEEE standardization for MIMO, he forges ahead with Airgo. Airgo also has been making waves, with wireless vendors lining up to embed the MIMO chipset in their wares.

Mark Spencer // President, Digium

At 27, Spencer has the youth and momentum to set the network industry spinning. He became famous in 2005, as the industry took notice of Asterisk, the open source PBX system he created, and of his continued pioneering work in open source telephony. Not only is Asterisk an intriguing open source option for VoIP, but as an open source hardware product it has become the proving ground for the entire open source movement. Spencer has been as admired for his marketing skill as for his technical abilities.

Jayshree Ullal // Senior vice president, Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco

As part of its July reorganization, Cisco top management testified to Ullal's power when it topped off her security responsibilities with storage and switching too. Ullal now oversees a business unit whose products represent almost half of the company's quarterly revenue, on average (see in-depth profile).

John Williams // Director, Auto-ID lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

When researchers at the Auto-ID lab at MIT talk about RFID technology, everyone listens. When Williams became the lab's director in April, one of his first missions was to launch an initiative to build a simulation of the EPCglobal Network. This came at the request of EPCglobal, a nonprofit clearinghouse of RFID information and standards-setting organization. Williams' project will study and model how RFID information flows within an enterprise and its supply chain. Williams also directs MIT's Intelligent Engineering Systems Lab, and is a recognized authority on large-scale simulations. Currently he's studying grid and agent technology to simulate the nation's critical information systems.

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