Technology power

Good science is frequently collaborative, and that’s not easy in the highly competitive IT world. Companies such as IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems must maintain a technological edge to survive. That makes it risky for them to share their best ideas and best thinkers with one another, even for a project that could benefit all.

Then there is the problem of internal politics. A successful innovator must either become a skilled reader of corporate culture to push a new idea within a company or bail out to a smaller firm already committed to the goal.

The 16 technology champions profiled in our cover storythis week include examples of all of the above.

Constantine Sapuntzakis was a 23-year-old Stanford grad student working as an intern at Cisco when he first began investigating whether the SCSI protocol could be used to drive large volumes of data efficiently over an IP connection.

It seemed radical at the time. SCSI was created for — and used mainly by — desktop computers. But Sapuntzakis’ boss, networking guru Andy Bechtolsheim, liked the idea; customers had been asking for better ways to manage enterprise-scale storage using Ethernet.

It turned out that several engineers at IBM were already investigating the same thing. Soon, the Cisco team joined with IBM’s Julian Satran, Kalman Meth, and Efri Zeidner and HP’s Mallikarjun Chadalapaka to propose what became the iSCSI (Internet SCSI) standard. That standard has since emerged as a dark-horse challenger to Fibre Channel for running SANs, and the five engineers are among those we honor in this third annual edition of the InfoWorld Innovator awards.

Another honoree, IBM Fellow Pat Selinger, worked with people both inside and outside of Big Blue to build support for technologies and standards that underlie the company’s On Demand computing strategy.

And IBM Fellow Rich Oehler tried for years to build interest in servers based on AMD’s Opteron processor before he left to join Austin, Texas-based startup Newisys to work on the same chip. Oehler’s faith was rewarded, among other ways, when IBM announced in April it will build a line of Opteron-powered servers.

The common thread in these stories, and in all the profiles in our feature, is simple: serious commitment to advancing IT science. That’s what kept Selinger dedicated to her projects when she could have stepped into a more administrative role. “[It] was a hard decision,” she says, “but I could not leave the technology because that was one of the fun parts of the job. And I wasn’t ready to give that up.”

That’s lucky for all of us.