ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORKING

Kurt DelBene
President, Office Division
Microsoft

Social media in the enterprise gets overshadowed by the Twitter and Facebook exploits, for better or worse, of both real cultural revolutionaries such as in the Middle East and insufferable twenty-somethings who have just discovered the bar scene. But Yammer has proved over the last few years that social networking for grownups can be just as transformational for business. Yammer provides secure, private social network for enterprises. It is used by more than 200,000 companies worldwide and 80 percent of the Fortune 500, including Ford Motor Company, Nationwide Insurance, Orbitz Worldwide and Telefonica O2.

Picking an individual from Yammer as a trendsetter would be very difficult as the whole company could qualify. But the move for Yammer having the biggest impact in 2012 and certainly over the coming years was its acquisition by Microsoft in July for $1.2 billion. Since Steve Ballmer himself credited Kurt DelBene with pulling the trigger on the acquisition, and since Yammer has been incorporated into his Microsoft Office Division, he gets our nomination.

DelBene is responsible for driving Microsoft's global productivity strategy. He oversees engineering and marketing for a wide range of productivity products and services, including Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Collaboration is his primary focus going forward. And collaboration is what Yammer is all about.

In July, DelBene said social networking is at the heart of everything we do, whether it’s consumers sharing experiences or how workers share information in the enterprise. “It is a key element in any collaboration and information sharing in the organization,” he said.

He also said that thanks in part to the inclusion of Yammer in the upcoming Office release, it was going to be a big year for Microsoft. In November, Microsoft unveiled its road map for SharePoint and Yammer integration, which includes investing in unified identity, integrated document management and feed aggregation.

Analysts at Seeking Alpha said that Microsoft financial performance improved from 2010-2012 when Kurt DelBene replaced  Stephen Elop and that Microsoft Business generated a 17 percent growth in revenue and 24 percent increase in profits in 2011 and a 7 percent  growth in revenue and profits in 2012. When SharePoint 2013 is released next quarter, the impact of the Yammer acquisition will begin to come clear.

POLICY AND CHARGING

Joe Hogan
Co-founder, chief technology officer and vice president
Openet

Out from under the weight of legal action by Amdocs — Openet won a summary judgment from a U.S. court denying Amdocs’s claim that its technology infringed on four of Amdocs’s patents — Openet began to flex its muscles again this year.

Joe Hogan said in October, at the time of the judgment, that the court’s decision vindicates the company’s strategy of innovation over litigation and that “Amdocs’s action shows it regards Openet as a serious competitive threat. Customers choose Openet because we channel our energy into creating better products instead of into litigation.”

Amdocs is no slouch at creating products either, but with its lawsuit concluded, Openet is focusing on creating solutions in transaction and interactive metering and policy. Hogan has served as CTO since founding the company with CEO Niall Norton in 1999; he is the principal architect of Openet’s product portfolio and is responsible for technology innovation. In 2011 he and Norton were named recipients of the 14th Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, and this year Openet launched an interactive gateway that enables operators to extend policy and charging control-system capabilities to devices for optimizing network resources.

The Interaction Gateway builds on Openet’s Subscriber Engagement Engine (SEE), which provides real-time insight of usage and spending by coordinating communication between an operator’s existing PCC infrastructure and a specialized on-device Interaction Agent for policy enforcement. In 2012 Hogan also launched the new Openet Labs, which has already contributed to standards such as the Sy interface between the Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) and online charging system (OCS). Openet Labs provides an ecosystem for innovation, including participation by prominent academics within an Openet Research Fellows program and third-party technology providers and researchers.