CBR 10 MOST INFLUENTIAL SPECIAL REPORT

Hello and welcome to this, the third annual CBR 10 Most Influential Special Report. Follow the links below to download the report in PDF format. As in previous years we think you'll find a few surprises, as well as a few rankings that are less than surprising: would you believe that both IBM and Microsoft feature in the CBR 50 IT Giants table?

There are many ways of slicing and dicing the technology industry into the winners and losers; the companies that should definitely be on a particular request for proposal, and those that should perhaps best be avoided. Gartner does its famous Magic Quadrants, CBR parent Datamonitor publishes its own regular sector analyses, and there are many others too, each with their own particular goals and methodologies.

The CBR 10, for the most part, does not claim to use a strict, quantitative methodology. Ranking vendors strictly by their total sales, or by their estimated market share (another discipline entirely with its own challenges) is all very well, but that's not our main goal with this report. The CBR 10 Most Influential sets out to pick the most influential vendors in the key IT categories on a far more subjective basis.

Chosen by CBR's own sector reporters and analysts, the vendors are chosen for the influence they have brought to bear on each sector through a combination of their technology prowess, market share, vision and even executive leadership.

CBR's sector analysts write daily news, day in and day out, in each of their beat areas. They write longer research reports and company profiles too, building up a unique picture of the sectors they track over many years. The most influential by sector sections then are their views of those sectors. By definition they are subjective lists, but they are also just as valuable as many more error-prone quantitative sector analyses.

By way of comparison, we've also included the CBR 50 IT Giants, which ranks the vendors by revenue, as well as the CBR 50 Shooting Stars, which ranks them by revenue growth. So it's possible to compare the companies in our most influential lists with their rankings by sales and sales growth. You'll find there are quite a few discrepancies. Again, being big doesn't always mean being influential.

But we kick off the report with something a lot lighter: our annual look at the 10 most influential people in the industry over the course of the last year or so. You may not agree with all of our choices in that or indeed the other articles in this report, but I hope that you at least find it interesting and perhaps it will even spark some debate. As always, we very much welcome your feedback.

Due to the large file size we have broken the PDF into 3 parts. Select from the sections below to decide which you wish to view

Report Contents:

Part 1 (click a link below):
p5    Executive Summary
p6    CBR 10 Movers and Shakers
p15  CBR 50 Shooting Stars
p21  CBR 50 IT Giants

Part 2 (click a link below):
TOP 10s BY SECTOR:
p27  Application Development
p31  Business Intelligence
p39  Enterprise Applications
p43  Infrastructure Management
p47  Integration
p51  IT Services

Part 3 (click a link below):
TOP 10s BY SECTOR:
p55  Networking
p59  Open Source
p63  Security
p67  Servers
p71  Storage
p75  Wireless
p78  Index

Note: the lists of most influential vendors were completed and published just prior to news of Siebel's acquisition by Oracle.