The Finals

Championship:

Feb 19:

It's official: Dell employees love Michael Dell. They propelled Dell to a 5,772-3,991 victory over Brocade's CEO Greg Reyes, also no slouch in the the Loved-By-His-Employees department. By virtue of his victory, Dell is "the Most Powerful Person in Networking," according to those that participated in our poll, which began with a field of 64 on January 2.

What did we learn? Big companies can definitely drive the vote. Dell's Asia-Pacific group was the bullpen that helped saved the game a couple of times, coming in late to help preserve a victory. But the little guy did well too. Christine Heckart, president of TeleChoice, made it to the quarterfinals based on a grassroot effort to knock off the big players in our game. In the end, the Dell influence was too strong for anyone to overcome. Like one voter commented, "Dude, it's a DELL!"

Roundup of the entire tournament

Semifinals:

Feb 14:

Michael Dell's Valentine was delivered in the form of a 4,524 to 208 victory over Cisco's Mario Mazzola. That's a whopping 4,316 vote differential! Joining Dell in the finals is Brocade's Greg Reyes, who rode a wave of employee support to a 2,959-1,701 victory over Nokia's Pekka Ala-Pietila. Dell and Reyes will face off Tuesday in a match to determine the "Most Powerful person in Networking."

Quarterfinals:

Feb 13:

Well, looks like some folks at Dell did not want either of their candidates (Michael Dell and the tag-team duo of Russ Holt/Randy Groves) to lose so they helped rig the vote. When we took the voting offline, there was a tie - 10,323 to 10,323. A quick look at the logs shows that a couple of people with Cable Modems and DSL lines in the greater Austin area decided to cast 1000s of votes for one of the two Dell candidates. Instead of wading through all those to figure out which votes are real and which ones are not, we decided to declare Michael Dell the winner over is two VPs Holt and Groves. In our other match, Nokia's Pekka Ala-Pietilla defeated Sycamore's Desh Deshpande, 754-280. Dell and Ala-Pietilla move to the semi-finals.

Feb 12:

The Cinderella story of #15-seed Christine Heckart, president of TeleChoice, has come to an end. Heckart put in a strong fight against #5-seed Mario Mazzola, even garnering anti-Cisco votes from the Brocade people voting in the second match. But in the end, Mazzola beat Heckart, 2,751-2,449, for the Layer 2 championship. Coming out of Layer 3, #13-seed Greg Reyes overcame strong Cisco support for his opponent, IEFT Chair Harald Alvestrand (#11-seed), to take the Layer championship, 3,146-2,215. Comments:

"I don't think the FCC is going to make any significant moves while Mr. Powell is the Commissioner." ... "Christine is off the shizzy nizzy... And Greg's got more fibre than Special K." ... "Because Christine's a bloody legend Down Under."

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