It's a good time to be an innovator - or in a position to encourage, recognize and reward innovation. And it's a good time to pay attention to the technology agendas of such people. Your company's viability may ultimately be ensured by the innovation these 10 people are driving from the labs to the enterprise.
Flip through a slide show of vital stats for these 10 IT leaders.

John Chambers, CEO, Cisco

The timing is lousy, because Cisco is set to move forward with its biggest product launch in years: the Nexus data-center switch platform, unveiled early in 2008. The company spent about $250 million developing Nexus, which has a unified switching fabric combining Ethernet, IP and storage capabilities. The platform is intended to cement a broader role for Cisco in the data center - but Chambers needs early adopters to step up this year.

On the positive side, Cisco means a lot more than switching. In its fiscal quarter that ended Oct. 25, the company showed solid growth in its advanced technologies unit, which includes application networking services (a 25% increase year over year), unified communications (+22%), video systems (+21%), wireless (+21%) and security (+19%).

Cisco also can draw from its experiences navigating economic slowdowns to get through the current one: "We did this in 1993, 1997, 2001, 2003, and in each scenario we gained both wallet share, and in my opinion, profit share," Chambers told investors in November. "As a result, we were better positioned coming out of these transitions vs. our peers."

Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware

As 2009 kicks off, Maritz is poised to move past the executive turmoil that scuttled VMware's upper ranks during the last several months. It began with Maritz's arrival in July and the ousting of then-CEO Diane Greene; those events were followed in September by the departures of co-founder (and Greene's husband) Mendel Rosenblum, who had been chief scientist, and Richard Sarwal, who led R&D. Then, in November VMware's senior director for security products, Nand Mulchandani, left the company for a start-up.

Amid the drama, VMware retooled its desktop virtualization technology and released a new hypervisor for mobile phones. Most significantly, Maritz unveiled plans for VMware's expansion in the data center via the Virtual Datacenter Operating System, which is designed to aggregate virtualized servers, storage and network resources into a single pool of computing resources. Components of VDC-OS, including vNetworks and vStorage for managing virtual pools of switches and storage equipment, are expected to ship throughout this year.