The Top 25 Newsmakers are selected by a panel made up of ITBusiness staff. The biggest debate this year came from who should be the top newsmaker. In previous years, some choices were clear-cut, while in other years there has been a war of words over which executive is worthy of the top spot.
This year’s debate was heated. We all agreed on the top story: AMD’s acquisition of ATI. The doubt was over who to name as top newsmaker from ATI. One camp preferred K.Y. Ho, the founder and leader of ATI for its existence until recently. The other camp pushed for David Orton, the current CEO.
The debate centered on Ho – did he have any part in crafting the deal? If he did, the panel would have a consensus.
Ho is ATI’s largest stockholder. He still had the title of chairman emeritus at the time of the acquisition.
On the other hand, ATI spokespeople were telling CDN and ITBusiness that he had nothing to do with the sale. Further to that ATI media relation’s staff told us that Ho has had no business dealings with ATI for a long time.
In his favour, the panel said Orton masterminded this acquisition. But some felt he basically executed Ho’s business plan.
This is the tricky part. We at ITBusiness pride ourselves on being responsible journalists. We do not run scandal sheets. So basically it came down to what we could prove.
It did not matter that some on the panel and a lot of other executives in the channel believe that Ho had either a great part in the deal or had influence over the deal. In the end, that was all just pure speculation.
What we believed, what happened and what news we had on the record were three separate things. Unfortunately, Ho hasn’t given a media interview in a while.
So Orton became the top newsmaker of the year. And he deserves it, because whether Ho was or was not involved it was up to Orton to make the deal happen.
Ultimately, Orton was out there in the field. It is one thing for Ho to possibly be pulling the strings somewhere behind a curtain, and quite another to execute.
Orton, the first non-Canadian to be named top newsmaker, executed this deal and that was the main fact.
As always, I like to name executives who did not make this list but for some reason there aren’t a lot of them this year. This list is pretty tight. However, I would be remiss if I did not mention Hummingbird founder Fred Sorkin, whose company OpenText acquired in October.
Sorkin, a Romanian immigrant, built Hummingbird into one of the real Canadian IT powers in the industry. There are too many stories about Sorkin to start here, but I will say this: He’ll be missed.