#7 Electronic Payments
It was like the good old days — for a week, anyway. When online payments company PayPal went public in February, its share price rose by nearly 55 percent. Then eBay announced that it was buying out Wells Fargo's stake in rival payment company Billpoint, and PayPal's price fell to its initial public offering level. But clearly there is life in electronic payments, and not just on the consumer side; business use may lag today (by a factor of five to one), but by 2005, B2B electronic payments could number more than 2 billion transactions. Last year, corporate payments via ACH exceeded $16 trillion. E-payments haven't matched early predictions, but as companies scrutinize the costs of paper processing, analysts say that electronic payments will move from exception to rule.
#8 Carly Fiorina
CEO, Hewlett-Packard
Walter Hewlett
Ex-Board Member, HP
Rarely have so many news stories about a business deal been prefaced by the phrase "at press time." First announced in September 2001, Hewlett-Packard's merger with Compaq Computer soon devolved into a bitter battle between two strong wills. HP CEO Carly Fiorina staked her job on the merger's success; HP shareholder Walter Hewlett argued that the deal would seriously damage the company co-founded by his father. On April 30, it appeared that Fiorina had finally won: a Delaware judge threw out Hewlett's lawsuit, clearing the way for Fiorina to prove that the largest merger in computer history will pay off for both shareholders and customers. Hewlett, ousted from HP's board the day after the trial ended, said he would support the merger, but would also keep a careful eye on the company. Fiorina vows to make good on her promise that the new HP will offer customers more products and services and the benefits of greater economies of scale. In May, HP spelled out its strategy with the slogan "We Are Ready." Customers hope "Willing and Able" will apply as well.
# 9 E-Business
Notice any upsurge in demand for Cobol programmers or client-server gurus? "E," as in E-business, E-commerce, E-everything, may no longer be cool, but every IT initiative of note continues to be built around the assumption that connecting employees, partners, and customers via the Internet is the top technological priority for business. In fact, E-business has simply become, like electricity itself, taken for granted. Not that it's a done deal: companies still face daunting decisions, and expenses, in taking full advantage of the wired world, and spending is expected to drop this year, largely because companies are delaying purchases of big-ticket items such as ERP and CRM. Online exchanges and "Net markets" have not produced a New World Order, nor has "disintermediation" transformed the business landscape. But as companies lick their wounds and reassess their strategies, any suggestion that "E" has gone the way of the company foosball table should be laughed out of the boardroom.
#10 Bill Gates
Chairman, Microsoft
While CEO Steve Ballmer has assumed an even larger day-to-day role following the departure of president and COO Rick Belluzzo, the ongoing antitrust case against Microsoft makes it clear that "chief software architect" Bill Gates is still the chief. Testifying in a case involving nine states and the District of Columbia, Gates defended the current marketing of the Windows operating system and claimed that a stripped-down version (with Internet browsing and media capabilities, among other features, removed) would "fragment" the market. Antitrust experts dubbed that the last argument of a monopolist. At press time the notion of any sort of "last argument" seemed remote, and Gates, while less combative than in months past, was clearly prepared to go the distance.
#11 Grid Computing
If there is a next big thing in the IT world, it just might be Grid computing. Backed by such tech giants as IBM and Intel, and a hot topic within the research community, Grid computing is a concept by which the Internet is used to share computing power, storage, and data. In a sense, all the world's computers can become one giant computer, accessible to all from virtually any computing device. It is, as IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger notes, "a grand challenge," but the concept has already been proven in several smaller implementations. Whether the Grid can envelop the world, however, remains to be seen.
#12 Michael K. Powell
FCC Chairman
Although he may not be top-of-mind for CFOs when talk turns to federal regulators, Powell chairs the organization that exerts enormous influence over all telecommunications matters, from deregulation to the technical aspects of Internet policy. A top priority for Powell this year will be determining what part of the broadcast spectrum will be used to facilitate high-speed ("third generation") wireless communications, and how and when to make it available to telecom carriers.
#13 XBRL
For CFOs, preparing and analyzing financial statements presents its own grand challenge. Often the numbers reported in the annual report don't match those filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission or posted on a company's Web site, due simply to clerical error. The manual labor associated with number crunching gets far worse when a financial executive tries to sift through the reports of competitors or potential acquisitions and make apples-to-apples comparisons. Different nomenclatures and reporting approaches can make such tasks extremely tough. Enter XBRL (extensible business reporting language), a subset of the XML language used to simplify data exchange via the Internet. Financial documents coded in XBRL can be distributed, shared, and analyzed with ease, and may soon inspire a raft of new analytical software that can import such documents and slice and dice them in sundry clever ways. Some software makers have modified their financial applications to facilitate XBRL coding. It may sound arcane, but it's a technology that CFOs can benefit from daily.
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