“You can’t come to customers with a blank sheet of paper,” Hennessey explains. “You have to give them something first, and then you find out they need other things to make the product useful in their environment.” Hennessey is currently working with his team to reduce its design cycle so that Kontiki can more quickly push out product updates to address customer needs. When Hennessey isn’t innovating or spending time with customers, he’s out forging partnerships. His work with Adobe and VeriSign resulted in implementing added security functions that allow SSO (single sign-on) functionality in Kontiki’s DMS and added protection for distributing PDFs. — S.T.S. Return to InfoWorld’s 25 Most Influential CTOs 2002 Technology Industry