SharePoint Influencer50

In 2008, John joined Bamboo Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and provider of SharePoint add-ons. New to SharePoint when he came to Bamboo following a 12-year career at AOL, on his second day on the job John began authoring a new blog for the recently launched SharePoint community, Bamboo Nation. That blog, SharePoint Blank, debuted with a post candidly titled "Confessions of a SharePoint Virgin," and established the open, honest, and conversational style that earned John a sizeable following as he went on to publish over 200 daily SharePoint Blank posts documenting his SharePoint learning process over his first year at Bamboo.

For Bamboo's Team Blog and SharePoint 2010 blog, John has extensively covered SharePoint conferences (establishing Bamboo Nation as an official media sponsor of the Best Practices Conference and SPTechCon) and related events such as Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft TAP Airlift, and SharePoint Saturday, authoring detailed session recaps and conference snapshots. In his role as Managing Editor, John has assembled a steady stream of guest bloggers for Bamboo Nation, representing a who's who of SharePoint notables, and has overseen the creation of dedicated topic areas within Bamboo Nation, working with resident experts such as Joel Oleson (SharePoint for Administrators) and Dux Raymond Sy (SharePoint for Project Management).

John regrets that he hasn't been able to devote a great deal of time to SharePoint Blank of late, but he's secretly plotting to begin carving out time amidst his new roles and responsibilities to stage a return to "Blanking" regularly again in the not-too-distant future.

SPTechCon, 10/20-10/22, Boston, MA

Ken Bisconti is vice president, products and strategy, for IBM's Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software. In this role, he oversees business management, product direction and strategy for IBM's ECM products including advanced case management, information lifecycle governance and trusted content analytics.

Ken is vice president of products and strategy for IBM's Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software, including the Lotus and FileNet acquisitions. As well as the primary spokesman for FileNet integration into IBM, Ken is responsible for articulating IBM's overall Information Management product strategy. By all accounts he's done a good job in convincing the market of FileNet's incorporation into IBM, notably its Information on Demand programs.

In his role, he oversees business management, product direction and strategy for IBM's ECM products including advanced case management, information lifecycle governance and trusted content analytics.

He joined IBM with the acquisition of Lotus and led the Lotus strategy for ten years before taken on his wider ECM role in 2007.

Mauro, owner of Cardarelli Consulting, was a surprise inclusion amongst our key market influencers. That's partly because his influence spans several channels. Mauro founded Jornata a well-established Boston-based SharePoint solutions provider and Mauro himself is a co-author of the book ‘Essential SharePoint 2007-Delivering High-Impact Collaboration.'

He's contributed to countless industry trade articles, spoken often at industry events and he also writes a popular blog blogs.officezealot.com/mauro.

Importantly, his blog is one of the most referred to from other blogs, showing that he is regarded as a source of reliable advice and support. He's highly respected as an expert in SharePoint.

SPTechCon - Boston - Oct 20-22

Andrew is the Senior Director of EMC's SharePoint Technologies Group. He is responsible for setting the strategic direction and ensuring the timely delivery of products that facilitate the interoperability of SharePoint and EMC Documentum. He is also responsible for the SAP interop and Archive Services for Reports product lines. Andrew has been working with ECM technology since 1996 as a customer, partner and vendor. He is an author of a book and a Blog on SharePoint, ECM and compliance.

EMC Momentum in Lisbon October 25-28th

Russ is a genuine mover and shaker in the SharePoint community, being co-founder of Corridor Consulting, a Microsoft partner (and well-known to KnowledgeLake). Corridor provides (mainly) SharePoint-based ECM solutions to a mix of public sector and private enterprises.

As well as running Corridor, Russ is active in the AIIM community. He's the Chair for AIIM's Emerging Technology Group (EmTAG), and so influences the industry on trends and new technologies.

He was also instrumental in establishing SharePointGovernance, a community of SharePoint experts, supported by, among others, AIIM.

Chris Geier is a 15-year veteran of the technology industry and specializes in all things Microsoft. He was introduced to SharePoint in 2001 while working for Microsoft services. Currently Chris is the a product manager for Metalogix on the StoragePoint product. Chris is a participant in, and advocate for, the SharePoint community, as well as a regular participant/speaker at SharePoint Saturday and other grass roots events. When he's not twiddling with the latest gadgets, software and technology, you'll probably find Chris on a bleacher cheering his budding baseball and gymnastics stars. Chris and his wife Sara have four kids and live in the suburban Chicago area.

There should be little explanation required for including Mark in our key market influencers. EMC is clearly the elephant in the room when it comes to any ECM-related marketplace. Mark is responsible for about 10% of EMC's total employee number, where he oversees development of solutions for content management, information governance, compliance and e-discovery, intelligent capture, SharePoint interoperability, records management, information access and customer communications management. . His remit also covers the division's product operations, new business development, global sales and marketing.

Prior to this he was EMC's CTO, co-leader of its Software Group, and most recently its Chief Development Officer, responsible for its overall technical strategy, overseeing mergers and acquisitions, and promoting its ‘One EMC' engineering team effort. He also formed EMC's Technology Ventures Group, EMC Innovation Network and its security initiatives.

He joined EMC as its CTO in 2002 from HP where he was VP and General Manager of Compaq's Enterprise Storage Group, at the time the second largest storage organization in the world after EMC.

John Newton, CTO and Chairman, has had one of the longest and most influential careers in content management. In 1990, John co-founded, designed and led the development of Documentum®, the leader in content management recently acquired by EMC®.

For the next ten years, he invented many of the concepts widely used in the industry today. In addition, he built Documentum's marketing and professional services organizations in Europe. John has also been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Benchmark Capital.

John was one of the founding engineers at Ingres® where he helped develop the world's first commercial relational database. John graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Joel is a senior product manager and SharePoint evangelist at Quest, where he is responsible for product direction and strategy. He is well known in the SharePoint community as an enthusiastic trainer, evangelist and architect, and he maintains a popular blog. Joel is a frequent speaker at popular technical conferences, such as Microsoft TechEd, and often presents to local SharePoint user groups.

Prior to Quest, Joel worked at Microsoft and was involved in the first Microsoft global deployment of SharePoint. During his Microsoft tenure, Joel helped various customers achieve the critical governance they needed to upgrade and achieve scale with SharePoint 2007. He later designed the extranet and hosted SharePoint deployments.

Before Joel joined Microsoft, he worked for a large telecom organization where he architected multi-tiered web applications and multi-staged extranet deployments. He also managed the internal web development and test environments for Slate.com, a political webzine.

Portuguese SharePoint User Group - Sep 29

Norway SharePoint Community & SharePint - Sep 30

SharePoint Saturday UK - Oct 1

The Experts Conference Europe - Germany - Oct 4-6

Sweden SharePoint Exchange Forum - Oct 18-20

SPTechCon - Boston - Oct 20-22

SharePoint Connections - Las Vegas - Nov 1-4

John Powell is President and CEO of Alfresco and has 25 years of enterprise software sales and operations experience.

Prior to Alfresco, John was responsible for running worldwide operations at Business Objects®. During his tenure, Business Objects grew at 50% per annum to $415m and a market capitalization in excess of $6B. Business Objects was subsequently acquired by SAP for $6.8B. Powell founded Business Objects UK in 1991, and built the UK organization and then the global organization into the most successful Business Intelligence player worldwide.

Prior to joining Business Objects, Powell worked in sales management positions at Oracle® and Comshare®. He has a BS First Class from Birmingham University.
John is the second Alfresco executive in our Top50 and he is well-known and respected commentator on all things ECM. He is, of course, negatively disposed towards SharePoint (and Microsoft in general), but this does not diminish his influence, whether sowing seeds of doubt over SharePoint's functionality or in its licensing regime.

John's day job is President and CEO of Alfresco and he has 25 years' enterprise software sales and operations experience. Prior to founding Alfresco he was responsible for running worldwide operations at Business Objects, before it was acquired by SAP (Alfresco is part funded by SAP Ventures). He previously worked at Oracle and Comshare.

As a CMO, Whitney is unusual in also being a key market influencer, but her profile, her longevity and her role at EMC mean that her views are often heard - she has credibility, a platform to stand on and significant market reach.

Her worldwide responsibilities lie across EMC's Information Intelligence Group. In this role, she is responsible for the division's global marketing strategy, branding and programs as well as all product marketing for the division's products and solutions, including EMC Documentum, EMC Captiva and EMC SourceOne. She joined EMC through the acquisition of Documentum. While at EMC she's been highly credited with heavily influencing the changing reputation of the former storage company to an information management company.

She has spoken at numerous industry conferences and tradeshows, and is an active spokesperson for the company with the press, analyst, and investor communities. She was a recipient of the Silicon Valley Women of Influence award in 2009 and the Top 40 Under 40 award in 2003.

Shane is a Microsoft MVP, specializing in SharePoint Server. He has over a decade of experience in designing and implementing solutions using Microsoft solutions. These deployments have ranged from 14 users to over 50,000users and have spanned the globe.

He's also the founder and principal consultant at SharePoint911, leading a team of SharePoint experts (several of whom are also MVPs). The firm was founded on the premise of emergency help (hence the name), based on Shane's experiences of being called out to avoid or repair SharePoint disasters. Since then they have evolved into the premier SharePoint only consulting firm in the world taking on simple helpdesk calls to full multiyear projects.

For the past five years, he has been working exclusively with SharePoint products and technologies as a consultant and trainer. He delivers courses for Critical Path training. He frequently speaks at industry conferences all over the world and has written five books on SharePoint.

SPTechCon - Boston - Oct 20-22