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Virtual : Paul Maritz, VMware

Paul Maritz may be a new face on this list, but he's a grizzled old veteran by software industry standards.

During Microsoft's astonishing run throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, Maritz was among the handful of executives driving the company's entire product and business development strategy.

Source: VMware

In 2000, he resigned as Microsoft's group vice president of platform strategy. Whether by his own design or the result of a power struggle at the top, Maritz was out. He went off on his own and started Pi, a Seattle-based company that developed software that let users "create, repurpose, store, share and access personal information in novel ways."

In February 2008, VMware parent EMC purchased Pi and named Maritz president of its new cloud infrastructure and services division. Five months later, Maritz replaced Diane Greene as VMware's new CEO in the virtualization software firm's first major shakeup after three-plus years of exponential growth in both its sales and stock price.

Now Maritz has a much different challenge. As the one-time undisputed leader in the white-hot virtualization software market, VMware is now adjusting to competition -- especially from his old employer -- from a slew of open source startups looking to make a name for themselves.

How or if VMware survives these new threats will largely be determined by how enterprise customers embrace vSphere, the company's cloud-based operating system that makes it easier for customers to manage, secure and update their virtual and physical servers.

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It's a key component of Maritz's vision of where he sees enterprise IT progressing -- toward a state where it can be considered "a single giant computer on which applications can be provisioned in a more manageable, scalable way." Central to that idea is an highly virtualized infrastructure that can be managed without disrupting application load, and which can enable IT admins the flexibility to seamlessly tap into internal and external clouds.

In the meantime, despite the mounting pressure and competition, VMware continues to thrive under Maritz' stewardship.

In June, vSphere 4 was named the Best of Interop 2009 Grand Prize winner and won the Best of Interop Award in the cloud computing and virtualization category.

In its most recent quarter, VMware earned $80 million on sales of $456 million and exited the period with more than $2.3 billion in cash. For the year, the company is expected to report sales in excess of $1.92 billion.

In early December 2008, VMware shares had fallen to a 52-week low of $17.25 a share but rallied up to more than $40 a share in late September.

VMware isn't standing pat. On Sept. 16 it acquired SpringSource for $362 million, a leading provider of "lean" enterprise and Web application development and management software.

Maritz, widely considered the only Microsoft executive to hold his own under intense pressure during the company's landmark antitrust hearings, surely has much to prove to Microsoft and those who doubt the future of complex, cloud-based applications.

None other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once called Maritz a "true leader among leaders."

Now he has a chance to run his own show.

Page 2: Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com

Page 3: Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat

Page 4: Evan Williams, Twitter

Page 5: Steve Jobs, Apple

Page 6: Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Page 7: Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media

Page 8: Paul Otellini, Intel

Page 9: John Chambers, Cisco

Page 10: Paul Maritz, VMware

Page 11: Carol Bartz, Yahoo