James Harding?s view from the valley (17 September)
Time magazine hosts its cyber Oscars, Milken takes his Nextera step and Tech Data stuns its analysts
It emerged this week that Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are among those to be featured as Time magazine?s ?cyber elite?, in the unlikely company of film director Steven Spielberg, professional hacker Mark Seiden and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.
A special celebration will be hosted here in San Francisco, in which the top 50 individuals deemed to be the ruling class of cyberspace will be unveiled. The list was compiled following an extensive poll of Silicon Valley and Wall Street leaders.
Inevitably, in a listing based on technology?s contribution to the global economy, IT industry bosses are going to feature fairly heavily, and they do, with a triumvirate of Microsoft executives at number one and IT heavyweights occupying nine slots in the top 10.
Of course to gain any attention in America you?ve got to be showbiz, and so we see Gates and his two lieutenants, Steve Ballmer and Nathan Myhrvold, win the top spot for neither market penetration nor profits, but for being ?an unmatched collection of the best corporate knights and magicians?.
America Online CEO Steve Case gets bronze for founding the world?s biggest online service provider, and IBM CEO Lou Gerstner takes fifth place for putting IBM back on the map by ?listening to customers?.
In sixth place comes Intel CEO Andy Grove, dubbed ?a father figure in the tech industry?, while Ellison takes eighth slot. ?In the geek society of Silicon Valley, Ellison is a flamboyant exception,? noted Time. ?His elegant Savile Row garb, however, belies a violent competitive streak.?
In at nine is John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, ?who has perfected the technique of strategic swallowing?, and just scraping into the top 10, Eckhard Pfeiffer, Compaq CEO, praised for his ambition to make Compaq bigger than IBM and ?his European roots and continental charm?.
To really demonstrate its showbiz credentials, cyber Oscars are also presented to film directors Steven Spielberg (28) and George Lucas (33).
Other non-industry figures among the elite are Mark Seiden, president of MSB Associates, who gets paid to attack corporate networks and test security (38), and James Bidzos, chief executive of RSA Data Security, is not far behind at number 41.
According to Time?s senior editor Joshua Ramo, it was a deliberate policy when compiling the Elite listing that attention should be paid to the grass roots of the industry, not just the Silicon Valley glitterati. ?We haven?t just chosen folks because they run large corporations or control billions in investment capital,? he said.
But the biggest cuckoo in the Silicon Valley nest is Rupert Murdoch, who takes the runner-up slot to the Microsoft trio. Murdoch is praised for his ambition, the scope of his empire and for ?gazing intently at the future?.
Michael Milken ? the one-time junk bond king jailed in the early 1990s, but now a reformed character ? is continuing to build closer ties with Oracle?s Ellison. The two have backed Nextera Enterprises LLC, a venture designed to build a $1 billion consulting organisation by the year 2000.
As part of the $500 million acquisition programme, Nextera has now picked up the consultancy firm Lexington ? a Massachusetts-based Symmetrix ? with revenues of up to $18 million.
This is Nextera?s first acquisition, coming just five months after the appointment of Gresham Brebach as Nextera CEO. Nextera is just one of the ventures that Milken and Ellison are funding from Los Angeles company Knowledge Universe.
There was growing speculation here in the Valley that Compaq is in discussions to buy up Unisys? systems integration and services unit. While both companies refused to comment on speculation ? the usual sort of line companies spin to put the press off the scent ? it appears that the PC manufacturer is keen to broaden its services offering.
This has been spurred on by the rumours that Compaq was in talks with Digital for its services arm. While Compaq bought Tandem earlier this year to gain an entrance into the high-end services market, the manufacturer is keen to be seen as an all-round desktop services provider.
Interesting reading that US giant distributor Tech Data completely blew away analysts? expectations with its second-quarter financial results.
According to Tech Data chairman and CEO Steve Raymund, the distributor has broadened its business through acquisitions. While there was some suggestion that Tech Data might pick up struggling distributor Azlan, Raymund said: ?I am aware of Azlan but unacquainted with the management team there. While we intend at some point to expand into the UK, we have no firm timetable as yet.?