The top 20 global Indian technology influencers

MUMBAI, INDIA: Twenty Indians  working for global giants like Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Google and Motorola, who are influencing how the global technology business will shape up in the next few years, are part of a list of ‘20 Indians who are making a difference’. Most of them are from the Indian Institutes of Technology.

The list of 20 Indian technology greats who are influencing the technology business globally is part of CyberMedia’s flagship technology journal Dataquest: a special issue being unveiled to coincide with the Nasscom annual conference starting February 14 at Mumbai.

The list is dominated by multiple Indians who are part of the global search giant, Google (Amit Singhal, Google fellow; Nikesh Arora, chief business officer and Sundar Pichai, Senior VP, Chrome) and Hewlett Packard (Prith Banerjee, Senior VP Research and director, HP Labs and Vyomesh Joshi, Executive VP, printing & imaging).

Also in the list are those charged with building the technology roadmaps for the world's top software companies: Vishal Sikka, Chief Technologist of SAP; Thomas Kurian, in charge of the product roadmap of Oracle (the company with broadest range of software products) and Satya Nadella, the low-profile president of Microsoft's servers and tools business.

The list also includes the USgovernment's first federal CTO Aneesh Chopra (who stepped down on February 8), McKinsey consultant Dilip Wagle, and blogger Om Malik of GigaOM whose words are followed in Twitter by some of these big executives themselves.

Cisco's CTO Padmasree Warrior is the only woman on this hallowed list. The two CEOs on the list are Sanjay K Jha, chairman & CEO, Motorola Mobility, and Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe. (Ms Warrior will be addressing the Nasscom India Leadership Forum in Mumbai.)

With over a dozen in this list being in their 30s and 40s, Dataquest editors expect them to move to CEO roles in the coming few years to play an even more significant role in shaping the technology.

The Dataquest list of 20 Technologists who will influence Technology

(In alphabetic order)

1 Abhijit Talwalkar, 47, CEO, LSI

2 Amit Singhal, 43, Google fellow, Google

3 Aneesh Chopra, 39, federalCTO,USGovernment

4 Arvind Sodhani, 57, EVP & president, Intel Capital, Intel

5 Dilip Wagle, director, McKinsey & Co

6 Nikesh Arora, 44, chief business officer, Google

7 Om Malik 45 blogger, investor, GigaOM

8 Padmasree Warrior 51 SVP, Engg & CTO, Cisco

9 Prabhakar Raghavan, 51, chief strategy officer, executive vice president Yahoo! Labs

10 Prith Banerjee, 51 SVP, research, and director, HP Labs Hewlett-Packard

11 Sanjay K Jha, 48, chairman & CEO. Motorola Mobility

12 Satya Nadella 43 president, servers & tools business, Microsoft

13 Shantanu Narayen, 48, CEO, Adobe

14 Sundar Pichai, 39 SVP, Chrome Google

15 Thomas Kurian 44 EVP, product development, Oracle

16 Vinod Khosla, 56. founder, Khosla Ventures

17 Vishal Sikka, 44, CTO & member, exec board, SAP

18 Vivek Kundra, 37 EVP, emerging markets, Salesforce.com

19 Vivek Ranadive, 54, CEO, TIBCO

20 Vyomesh Joshi, 57, EVP, printing & imaging, Hewlett-Packard

Those Indians who have contributed in the past but are no more active do not feature in the list, because their actions cannot influence the current and future trends. The only two veterans who still feature in the list--Vyomesh Joshi and Vinod Khosla--are there because they are still influencing how the technology business shapes up.

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Not surprisingly, most of those on the list are engineers, with a majority from the IITs atDelhi,Madras, Kharagpur,Kanpur, Roorkee. There are people from other colleges too: IT BHU, MS University, Osmania, and Manipal.

The sole non-engineer in the list–Om Malik--comes from St Stephens,Delhi. He is the odd one out. A journalist turned blogger, he is actually one of the few in the list who have actually worked inIndiafor some time. IT Trainer NIIT also lists Malik amongst its alumni.

IBM, which employs more people inIndiathan in theUS, does not have a single top executive who is Indian and is the only significant tech company that is missing from this list.