 No. 10 Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com
Last year's position: 38
Up 28 places from last year, Marc Benioff has become a big character in what feels like a short period of time: physically big, making big waves in a big new area for tech - and regularly shooting off his big mouth.
That sounds like a criticism - a pretty big one, too - but in many ways it's not. Benioff leads the most famous application service provider - that's ASP - outfit, executing on the software-as-a-service model, mainly for CRM. He has headed arguably the year's second most influential tech IPO and his baby is still gathering momentum - meaning all eyes will be on salesforce.com and its leader for some time.
So he's fallen into trouble with the SEC in the US over a New York Times article during a quiet period and there's a lawsuit hanging around for supposedly "misleading shareholders" - see these as signs that what salesforce.com and Benioff do matters.
Look out for plenty more customers - and staff - from Siebel and Oracle finding the lure irresistible.
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