Leader: Three hot issues and the Agenda Setters 2004 poll

Open source, offshoring and security dominate...

Never before has silicon.com produced an Agenda Setters poll of tech's movers and shakers with so many lesser-known names. There's a reason for that: the nature of the areas that are hottest right now and will be for the foreseeable future.

Sure, our dozen or so panel experts cast their votes after some hours of rigorous arguments and counter-arguments and some usual suspects turned up. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds and Rupert Murdoch all need no introduction. But they didn't boss the poll, as they have in some past years.

Nor was the final outcome down to any predetermined tactics by our panel to 'be different', just for the hell of it. Instead, the final rankings seem to show the growing importance of three subjects: open source, offshoring and security/privacy.

Let's take them in order, consider some of the areas that were also important, and then stick our neck out to draw some conclusions.

Open source is about more than Torvalds, as Sylvia Carr writes in her analysis on this subject here. He's in at number 7 and always fares well but those who have pioneered the commercialisation of open source offerings, among them Linux, are right up there. Consider MySQL CEO Marten Mickos at an impressive 12 (in the absence, for once, of fellow database king Larry Ellison), Red Hat engineer Mark Cox at 40 or Open Source Risk Management's Daniel Eggers at 37.

And, though it's a stretch, how about IBM's Sam Palmisano at 27 (in the absence of half a dozen other major vendor bosses) and even Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, as that company looks to more open approaches to help turn around its business?

Free software guru Richard Stallman sneaks in at 44, while academics such as University of Chicago's Ian Foster are also in there highlighting different models to the 'vendor sells you software they control' approach.

Even California is looking at open source software - thanks to civil servant Bernard C Soriano, this year's Mayor of Munich, who places at 49.

But few topics these days command more column inches - or more emails to the silicon.com virtual mail bag - than offshoring. Last year, this trend was already high-profile but panellists picked on politicians such as the premiers of India and China as those setting that agenda.

Not any more. The wider industry now looks to a range of company bosses to lead this trend, as Andy McCue explains here. Two companies fare particularly well. TCS CEO S Ramadorai (20) and Ratan Tata (45) both play for the same team while Wipro chips in with Vivek Paul (26) and Azim Premji (35). From the West, CSC CEO Van Honeycutt makes it in at 38 as one of the most successful proponents of outsourcing/offshoring.

China premier Hu Jintao still makes the list but he is down to 41 from a mighty fourth place 12 months ago.

But politicos with clout are to be seen near the top of our rankings. NHS IT tsar Richard Granger even manages to climb eight places this time to 6.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and UK Home Secretary David Blunkett come in at 4 and 5 respectively. Their power - though it has to be asked if they would be agenda setters when they inevitably move on - is neatly counterpoised with a campaigning individual who is in at 50, Privacy International's Simon Davies.

Clearly, for every ID card scheme or poorly thought out national database there are dissenting voices but, for now at least, those doing the cracking down are more influential. Reporter Jo Best looks at this in more depth here.

Individuals from these three areas make up a considerable portion of this year's 50. A number of big name CEOs weren't considered worthy and even a hot area such as mobile and wireless, with VoIP entrepreneur Niklas Zennstrom in at 3, doesn't figure like it has done in the recent past, as Tony Hallett details.

In 2002, no fewer than five Big Media chiefs made the final top 10 - Rupert Murdoch (1), Steve Case (2), Jean-Marie Messier (4), Thomas Middelhoff (7) and Greg Dyke (9). Apart from one of them they are no longer in their posts. The exception is Murdoch (now at 18), who this year finds his son James Murdoch two places above him.

That makes for a nice father-son hook but perhaps the greater story, as Will Sturgeon explains, is the BBC's Ashley Highfield pipping Apple's Steve Jobs to the top spot this time. Sure, in a year which sees two other Apple employees make our 50, Jobs has a good case to become the only person ever to repeat as number 1 but then what Highfield has done for new media and the use of technology is impressive.

Indeed, while open source, offshoring and security/privacy dominated as subjects, the bulk of the remainder of names were true 'man behind the man' material. An age of "re-regulation", as one Agenda Setters panellist termed it, was personified in people such as senators Sarbanes and Oxley and IASC chairman Sir David Tweedie, while two other Microsoft executives besides Bill Gates made it - neither of them CEO Steve Ballmer.

It was that kind of year and that's no bad thing. We always get the feeling there are a lot of individuals who pull in millions and run some well-known companies or even countries but they aren't the ones making the important decisions. This year's top 50 is diverse and has a lot of surprises. Long may that be a trend that continues.