The Valley View of Enterprise Tech Power

What a pleasant surprise to see Business Insider wake up to enterprise tech, and even say “it’s really the stuff that’s changing the world” as it lists the “50 Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech”.

The cloud is well represented – executives of Amazon, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP/SuccessFactors, Workday – are in there. So is infrastructure – Dell, EMC, HP. So are enterprise VCs – Ray Lane, Marc Andreessen etc.

But I found some glaring omissions:

• No CIOs. Seriously? A CIO with a $ 5 billion annual IT budget in a New York or London bank does not qualify as powerful? Someone like Gary Reiner who did many innovative things at GE and is now an investor at General Atlantic?
• No outsourcers other than IBM. No Accenture or TCS? No Foxconn, one of the biggest contract manufacturers and employers in the world?
• No telecomm players? Most companies spend more on telecomm than all software, hardware and IT services put together. They may be boring but a Verizon or Deutsche Telecom would have made my list.
• Little European or Asian representation. Actually, little N. American representation outside the Valley.