50 on Power's edge, 12/25/00

By ANN SULLIVAN
Network World, 12/25/00

Infrastructure bedrocks

Serge Tchuruk

Daniel Warmenhoven

Craig Barrett
President and CEO, Intel

Today's Intel is about more than processors, thanks to Barrett's diversification campaign and push into the enterprise with backbone switches, remote-access products and Web hosting. From his Montana ranch, Barrett weathered summer wildfires, and from his fifth-floor cubicle, he weathered the August recall of the 1.13-GHz desktop Pentium III processor. An avid hiker - he met his wife atop Arizona's Squaw Peak - Barrett always takes the stairs.

Jim Basillie
Chairman and co-CEO, Research in Motion

Basillie once described himself and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis as "type A quadruple plus." That energy helped the pair attract a cult-like following to their always-on BlackBerry wireless e-mail devices. No Silicon Valley flash-in-the-pan start-up, Research in Motion (RIM) was founded in 1984 and is a star player in Canada's IT industry. Basillie hasn't let RIM's rapid growth and BlackBerry's international success go to his head, however. He still lives in the house he was married in and drives the car he owned six years ago.

Robert Bernard
Chairman and CEO, MarchFirst

He's written plays and designed homes, and he owns a dog biscuit bakery in Chicago's trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood. But can Bernard turn things around at MarchFirst, the cash-poor Internet and technology company created by the merger of Whittman-Hart and USWeb/CKS? One year into the merger, the consulting company faces off-the-mark earnings, plummeting stock prices and layoffs. Investment company Francisco Partners committed to a $150 million cash-for-stock deal in December after MarchFirst told the Securities and Exchange Commission it needed $100 million to stay afloat.

Carly Fiorina
Chairman and CEO, Hewlett-Packard

The honeymoon may be over for Fiorina, after Hewlett-Packard's poor fourth-quarter 2000 showing and canceled PricewaterhouseCoopers deal. But don't expect this leader to give up on the marriage. Her intention is to build HP's services arm and grow new markets such as wireless devices. The highest paid woman executive in Silicon Valley, according to the San Jose Mercury News, Fiorina is under heavy pressure to make good.

Bobby Johnson
President and CEO, Foundry Networks

Johnson is a student of military history and strategy who appears to have declared war against Foundry's greatest competitor in the LAN and WAN switch market: Cisco. Revenue for third-quarter 2000 grew 191% over last year's third-quarter revenue. Among its new business is a deal with Yahoo that enlists Foundry's hardware to work the Web site's GeoCities Web community.

Greg Reyes
President and CEO, Brocade Communications Systems

Fibre Channel is the lifeblood of Brocade, maker of switches, software and services for connecting storage devices and servers through storage-area networks (SAN). An advocate of interoperable SAN products and standards-driven infrastructure, Reyes is the envy of dot-com casualties: A Brocade stock climb from the $50 range in December 1999 to $267 in October 2000 made him a billionaire.

Gordon Stitt
President, CEO and chairman, Extreme Networks

Gigabit Ethernet evangelist Stitt preached his "Ethernet everywhere" mantra in 2000, and folks seem to be listening: Extreme is in the lead for overall Layer 3 switch port shipments, with 30% of the market as of September 2000, according to market research firm Dell'Oro Group. Stitt sees Ethernet extending beyond the corporate LAN and into metropolitan-area networks as an alternative data-transport technology to SONET; the company rolled out its Alpine and Summit switches to make that happen.

Serge Tchuruk
Chairman and CEO, Alcatel

Purging its nontelecom units - including a winery in France - and buying equipment vendors such as Xylan and Newbridge Networks is part of Tchuruk's grand plan to transform the European voice gear company into a global giant. Going into 2001, 100% of Alcatel's business will be telecom related, Tchuruk said in November. Alcatel's telecom business went from 39% of total sales in 1995 to 85% in 1999 to an expected 100% in 2000. In addition to a high-profile buying spree, Tchuruk has made some significant changes inside the French firm: He made English the company's official business language, and he introduced U.S.-style stock options companywide.

Daniel Warmenhoven
CEO, Network Appliance

David to Goliath EMC, storage vendor Network Appliance is the leader in the network-attached storage market, an alternative to high-end storage systems. Creating a new market segment is among Warmenhoven's proudest accomplishments, he says. Not content with small and midsize Web warehousing, Warmenhoven, yet another former IBMer doing well as lead banana, is making a play for the enterprise market with storage appliances that can scale to 12 terabytes.

The rest of the 50 on Power's edge

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Carrier infrastructure czars

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