Business Innovation Homepage > Collaboration
Innovation:
Our picks for the key people to watch in the coming year.
December 11, 2006
1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Michael Baum
As the Web undergoes another wave of construction, all those new teraflops and terabytes often go awry. Companies are assembling new data centers to support soaring e-commerce, search, and video traffic, and technologies such as Ajax and virtualization are making Web sites more complex—and outage-prone. Amazon.com and Wal-Mart suffered site delays and downtime on higher-than-expected Thanksgiving-week traffic. Meanwhile, systems management has become spread out among teams in the United States, India, and elsewhere.
Into the breach has stepped Splunk, a San Francisco startup whose software crawls the Web performance data generated by companies’ servers and software in search of bottlenecks that cause crashes. Its approach can save companies hundreds of hours in a given week compared with scouring for problems in printed reports, says CEO Michael Baum.
 Baum, a serial entrepreneur who’s sold companies to IBM, Yahoo, and Reuters and was an engineer on IBM’s original PC team in 1981, started venture capital-backed Splunk (the name is a twist on spelunking) two years ago to address the complexity riddling data centers, and what he says is the inadequacy of IT tools to fix it.
By the time IT staffs analyze all the server log files, PHP script, Java and .Net code, and database transactions that may have caused an outage, “users are irritated, the app still isn’t working, and I may have advertisers or customers who are losing money because of it,” Baum says.
In its first year with a product, Splunk signed 125 customers. Apple uses it to troubleshoot Web apps and maintain the e-mail system it uses to communicate with customers. FedEx bought Splunk’s software to help manage Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. The U.S. Postal Service has used it to cut by nearly 60% the average time between crashes for tens of thousands of servers.
Splunk is poised to compete with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and other large vendors of software for managing data centers. Baum says the IT knowledge he and his management team gleaned while working at places like Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo helps them better understand the hodgepodge of systems large IT shops reckon with daily.
As for his time at IBM, it didn’t last long. Baum arrived in Florida at the tail end of IBM’s legendary PC project, working on the system’s BIOS and other boot-up software.
“It was a gas. Everybody knew they were doing something special,” he says.
That was then, though everyone agrees that a well-tuned Web is something special, too. Baum’s doing his part to make it work. —Aaron Ricadela
Jeremiah Grossman
Jeremiah Grossman has no qualms about being labeled a false prophet. That would mean companies are writing secure Web applications, and he’d have done his job as a security researcher by spotlighting yet another dangerous Web app flaw.
Grossman, a former Yahoo security officer, started WhiteHat Security, a software and services firm, in 2001. He’s also the co-founder of the Web Application Security Consortium, where he does re- search for its database of Web hacking incidents.
At the Black Hat conference last July, Grossman warned that the corporate world was only 18 months away from cybercrooks hijacking employees’ Web browsers and using them to attack systems inside the firewall. There are 100 million Web sites, he says, and many of them have flaws that let outsiders insert malicious code that can infect browsers with malware. Those infected browsers let the attackers steal important information, such as logon names and passwords, as users navigate through intranet-based HR apps or send print jobs over the network.
Security pros have knocked themselves out building perimeter security, says Grossman, but that will mean little if they don’t stop outsiders attacking from the inside. —Larry Greenemeier
John Wookey
 By a twist of fate, John Wookey, a straight-talking, intensely driven software development exec at Oracle, has found himself in his dream job, and it’s one of the hardest jobs in Silicon Valley: delivering on the vendor’s ambitious application road map.
“Market leadership in applications is my dream,” Wookey said after Oracle acquired PeopleSoft last year and he was tapped to head development of that software. The visibility of the position didn’t give him pretensions. As he ascended the podium to follow Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, he said the Armani part of the presentation was over and the Men’s Warehouse part was about to begin.
Now that Wookey is overseeing Fusion, a set of Java applications that combines the best of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel, his market leadership aspirations might be within sight. But with Oracle trailing SAP by a wide margin, well, you know what they say about wishes: Be careful.
Wookey’s reputation hangs on whether he can deliver the apps on schedule in 2008 and with enough functionality to satisfy each customer base. Everything’s on track, he assured an Oracle OpenWorld audience in October.
That’s either a dream about to come true or wishful thinking. —Charles Babcock
Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington’s heroes are entrepreneurs. He’s let penniless ones crash in his California home for months at a time. That respect and interest, he says, is what drives his influential TechCrunch blog. “A blog can be successful as long as you write passionately about something you love,” he says. “Startups are something I love.”
It worked for TechCrunch, but can Arrington keep up the momentum and the quality? TechCrunch faces the problem of many successful blogs, that of moving from a single personality to a product, while keeping the spark that drew readers in the first place. Arrington employs five full-time writers and five part-timers. “TechCrunch has lost something now that it’s more than Arrington,” someone recently posted in the comment section at TechCrunch. “There was a charm to TC when it was just MA sledding downhill at 80,000 MPH on the seat of his pants.” Arrington appears to be trying to cede some control to others: He says he’s taking off most of December to ski and hang out at his parents’ vacation home in Washington, though there were three posts from him to start last week.
Barely a year old, TechCrunch is pulling in $150,000 a month in advertising revenue, says Arrington, 36. He worked with startups in a former life as a corporate lawyer, and he leans on his venture capital connections for scoops about Silicon Valley happenings in order to compete against conventional media and rival blogs like ValleyWag. He started the blog as a hobby just around the time everyone started talking up Web 2.0 and venture capital once again began flowing into the parched valley. “I was lucky,” he says. “I got in front of the parade at the right time.” Since then, TechCrunch has evolved into not so much a personal blog, but a news site covering new products and companies.
Arrington insists there’s no risk of TechCrunch turning into a slush pit of rewritten press releases, even with a stable of writers who may not have his valley connections. “I don’t cover news unless it’s interesting,” he says. “I write stories companies don’t want me to write,” adding that he operates on rumor and insider information.
He has big plans. TechCrunch’s network, as he calls it, now includes the gadget blog CrunchGear, and he wants to add blogs to cover vertical markets and eventually hire more writers. As an entrepreneur, Arrington may find himself in the all-too-familiar position of making tough decisions about how to grow while keeping a passion—in this case a love of startups that drove one person to write a blog that stood apart from others. —Mary Hayes Weier
continued >>
Click here for more Human Factors articles
|
