Companies spent an estimated $3.4 trillion on business tech in 2016.
With that kind of money, the business technology market has created some of the most powerful people in tech this year. That's not just business power, either: Some of the market's biggest millionaires and billionaires also took up political causes this year, fighting the establishment in their own ways.
Meet the 32 people who left the biggest mark in enterprise tech in 2016:
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Scott Guthrie: Microsoft's cloud man
Microsoft Executive VP of Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie
Microsoft is betting its entire future on cloud computing, even as sales of its traditional Windows and Office boxed software continue their slow but steady decline.
It's meant that Scott Guthrie, who leads cloud computing at Microsoft — including its Microsoft Azure cloud platform and Dynamics CRM businesses, both of which grew mightily in 2016 — has become an increasingly huge force at the revitalized company.
And he's going to get even more power, very soon. Microsoft's $26.2 billion takeover of LinkedIn will go under Guthrie's umbrella, as the data feeds into the Dynamics CRM platform.
Werner Vogels: building upon Amazon's cloud lead
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
Amazon Web Services is far and away the leader in the fast-growing cloud computing market, where companies rent functionally unlimited supercomputing power for fractions of pennies on the hour. It's already a $12 billion business for Amazon, and the retail giant's most profitable unit.
So much of that success is because of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, whose team keeps finding new ways to drive the price of Amazon Web Services down, even as they add new features that make it an increasingly attractive alternative to, say, Oracle.
And as Amazon keeps building its cloud under Vogels' direction, it just keeps the pressure on the legacy IT world and startups alike to drop prices and up their game.
Michael Dell: taking command of an empire
Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell
In 2016, Dell's blockbuster $67 billion acquisition of one-time rival EMC finally closed, in the biggest high-tech deal ever.
It makes industry stalwart Michael Dell the leader of one of the world's biggest IT companies — and one of the last big holdouts against the rise of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud-computing platforms.
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