Agenda Setters: Where are they now... Carly Fiorina

As the countdown begins in earnest to silicon.com's fifth annual Agenda Setters poll of tech's 50 most influential individuals, it is time to look back at those individuals who held top 10 positions in 2003. To kick off, we assess what's happened to HP's Carly Fiorina.

Last year she experienced downsides (fostering a relatively poor services strategy, especially compared to IBM) and upsides (supreme leadership, notably through the Compaq merger). So perhaps it's natural to feel it both wrong and right that Fiorina placed at 10.

She was up 12 places on the previous year's poll (a surprise), still the highest ranked woman (not so surprising) and still very much in the top job at HP (a surprise to about half our panel last year).

So what of the past 12 months? Following August's big HP conference in the US, it is clear that HP remains both one of tech's key players and yet also somewhat mixed up. Fiorina can take credit/blame for both.

Although many would argue otherwise, it is possible the company would be in a worse way if it - and she - hadn't pursued Compaq so singlemindedly. But recent results and a night of the long knives that saw several key executives exit stage left show all is not well.

Services are still not the business they could be for HP, not in the league of an Accenture, IBM GS or several others, while in the server market, competing with Sun is one thing and defending against the execution of Dell or the range of IBM is another. Ditto for storage (only with a couple of other key rivals).

Fiorina remains powerful, with a brand of no-nonsense, intellectual leadership - and it is leadership - that others would do well to respect. But a top 10 finish this year? Would you bet on it?

silicon.com's Agenda Setters panel, again made up of CIOs, analysts, VCs, consultants, lawyers, academics and other experts, will be convening this September at our London offices, with our results revealed at the end of that month. If you want to pass on your comments for our experts, about Carly Fiorina or any other contender, drop us an email at editorial@silicon.com.