Top Ten Stars Realigned

Just in time for St. Valentine's Day, Byte and Switch presents the winter 2003 reshuffling of our Top Ten Storage Networking Stars list of the most influential people in the industry.

Of course, our hand was forced on this -- since one of our esteemed entrants got laid off (see Salomon Axes Storage Team).

Had Salomon Smith Barney consulted with us before making its abrupt decision to chop senior storage analyst Clint Vaughan, we would have told them a thing or two about Clint. He was bright and wicked fast at getting his investor notes out, which were always insightful. The loss is Salomon's. More important, it screws up our list.

Due to popular demand, Robert Montague and his team over at RBC Capital Markets will replace Vaughan. We received tons of email from readers demanding that Montague and company be on the list, so lets see how they stack up.

We've made a few other tweaks to the list. But to those of you who nominated yourselves -- or worse still, your boss! -- you know who you are. We have decided to spare you the horrible embarrassment of mentioning you by name. This time.But we're hoping to get a better discussion going about our picks. When we launched our first version of this list six months ago, we heard nary a peep from anyone (see Top Ten Storage Networking Stars). OK, we heard one very irritating peep from a Wall Street type who was unbelievably cheesed off that we hadn't put one of his buddies on our list:

"I am just trying to pacify some important storage thought leaders who have to answer to CIOs and CEOs who do not understand your constituencies, motivations, and biases," Jim Berlino of Morgan Stanley wrote to us at the time. Jim, our biases and motivations are outlined below and in the story that follows.

Before we cut to the action, note that we've added a new rule: No more than one person from any company can be on the list at the same time. It's just easier that way. To recap, here are the rules for getting on the list:

Click on the links in the table below to read the writeup for each member of our Top Ten.

Table 1: Top Ten Storage Networking Stars