Announcing: The CTOvision.com Technology Titan List

September 25, 2009 By BobGourley

I’ve long sought to track disruptive IT on the CTOvision.com site, and have featured several firms on the CTOvision.com Disruptive IT list. A new feature on the site is the CTOvision.com Technology Titan List, where I’ll more closely track the activities of the Information Technology firms with the largest market cap. This is the first entry on this theme.

One thing has become very clear through the years. The great powerhouse’s of the Information Technology industry continue to drive innovation- either through their own R&D or through purchasing innovative technologies for integration into their offerings. Those who want to track what is coming next should closely watch the big IT firms.

But which ones should we watch? The bad news is there is no perfect method. But a key measure of note is the market capitalization of a company. The market cap is the total dollar value of all outstanding shares of a company (share price times shares outstanding). It is a market consensus of a company’s equity. For a CTO or other technologist, it can also be a general indicator of staying power, vision and ability to deliver, since you don’t get a high market cap in the IT world without those factors.

The CTOvision.com list of Tech Titans includes IT firms with a market cap of over $16B. I’ve built a Google spreadsheet, tied it to live financial data, and now have a dynamic graphic of the market cap of the biggest tech firms. I also use automated search tools to scrub news feeds from these sources and use that information to help drive assessments elsewhere on the CTOvision.com site, including assessments on the future of IT.

The companies tracked on the initial list are: Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google, Cisco, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Qualcomm, SAP, EMC, Dell, Yahoo, Adobe, VMware and Symantec.

The following graphic is a up to date snapshot of the market cap of these top tech titans:

Did you find that graphic surprising? Isn’t Apple’s rise incredible? Another thing that jumps right out at you from this list is the power of American IT. Only one of the firms on this list is a non-US company (SAP). There are other foreign firms that are helping shape the future of IT and after more evaluation I may add others (Sony Corporation, with a Market Cap of $30B, is a player, but I’m evaluating its business segments before placing them on this tracking list).

Want to kick off a search for more data/news on these Technology Firms? Click on the links below to bring up news on each: