By JULIE BORT AND JIM DUFFY Chairman and CEO, AT&T AT&T certainly hasn't had the year C. Michael Armstrong had hoped it would in 2000, especially as a faltering voice business dragged its financials into the doldrums. His bold plan to break up AT&T will have radical implications for the telecom giant - and its customers. Steve Case Bernie Ebbers Ellen Hancock  In the 1980s, Ellen Hancock was networking at IBM. She remains about as well known for her 29 years at Big Blue as she is for her skyrocketing Web hosting start-up, Exodus Communications. Those years led her to the inner circle of IBM and a mouthful of a title: senior vice president and group president of the Networking Hardware, Networking Software and Software Solutions divisions. But her star fell with the changing of the IBM guard from John Akers to Lou Gerstner, when she was ousted and blamed for IBM's failure to grasp massive change in the networking industry.
After go-nowhere stints in leadership roles at National Semiconductor and Apple, the latter ending in a job-ending run-in with Steve Jobs, she landed as CEO of Exodus in 1998. Hancock spied an enterprise market, and now the company is on track to bill out more than $1 billion per year, mostly to companies with complex hosting needs. Hancock's laughing all the way to the bank. Not only is she featured on all the who's who lists magazines like to publish, but as of last summer, she ranked No. 51 on a list of the highest-paid executives in Silicon Valley. That put her at No. 4 for highest-paid women, according to the San Jose Mercury News. As for Exodus, the tough, ambitious Hancock doesn't see a company, she sees an empire. Her goal is to become the most powerful woman in computing, she pledged in a recent BusinessWeek article. As evidence that she's on her way, she orchestrated the $6.5 billion acquisition of competitor GlobalCenter. Exodus gets 32 data centers and is positioned to sell higher margin managed services to a new slew of Web hosting customers. For Hancock, Exodus has meant a second arrival among the network industry's powerful. Ivan Seidenberg Ivan Seidenberg holds one of the more interesting job-sharing positions a company ever invented: the co-CEO slot of a telecom behemoth. That giant would be Verizon, which sprung to life in 2000 as a Fortune 10 company from the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE. Seidenberg, former head of Bell Atlantic, will share the CEO office with Charles Lee, GTE's former CEO and Verizon chairman, until 2002. Then, it's all his baby. Seidenberg clearly thinks bigger is better. He has now navigated through three major telecom mergers: Bell Atlantic with Nynex; Bell Atlantic with GTE; and the wireless divisions of Bell Atlantic and GTE with Vodafone AirTouch. That's quite an empire for a man who began his career three decades ago as a cable splicer's assistant. Seidenberg's ultimate goal is to form a conglomerate that matches the largest competitors, something neither Bell Atlantic nor GTE could hope to achieve before they merged. With 63 million voice lines, 26 million wireless customers and operations in 21 countries, Verizon can take on the AT&T/TCI/MediaOne cartel, the SBC Communications/Pacific Bell/Ameritech combo and the WorldCom/MCI duo. Seidenberg fancies himself a businessman and an activist. The objects of his political attentions are education and diversity. He serves on the boards of The New York Hall of Science, the National Urban League and Pace University, from which he received his master's degree.In the past year, he's spoken about racial diversity in the workforce to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) and The Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, an organization led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and involving leaders on Wall Street and in the White House. Seidenberg announced a $10 million investment for a venture capital fund to be given to Hispanic-run start-ups and managed by the USHCC. Likewise, Seidenberg has promised more jobs to minorities and $200 million to be spent with Hispanic vendors. This doesn't include the works of the Verizon Foundation, which doles out hefty grants to worthy causes. Joe Nacchio Ed Whitacre Known for casually killing rattlesnakes on his Texas ranch with a swift smack of a stick, Whitacre pursues business goals with that same Wild West tenacity. In February 2000, the Department of Justice dealt what seemed like a deathblow to SBC's long-distance hopes: It recommended that the company be blocked from that business. Yet in July, the Federal Communications Commission acquiesced and approved SBC for long-distance offerings in Texas. By October, SBC had grabbed about one million long-distance customers and applied for approval in Kansas and Oklahoma. Chalk up another win for Whitacre, whose vision is to grow SBC to dizzying heights in the number of phone lines the company owns and the variety of services it offers over those lines. Still, one can't be a telecom giant without critics. In his takeovers of other phone companies, Whitacre has been characterized as a raiding Texan. Managers at acquired regional Bell operating companies in faraway places such as California and the Midwest have complained that they retain little power. Whitacre prefers to keep it to himself and his good-old-boy oligarchy. This has created ill will toward him in his far-flung empire, which includes interests in 23 countries. Such animosity is not helped by the company's inability to meet demands for its business data services. In October, more than a year after SBC's takeover of Ameritech, Whitacre apologized publicly to state regulators for SBC's mounting order backlogs and customer complaints. But Wall Street loves him. SBC rose from No. 35 to No. 12 on the 2000 Fortune 500 list and from No. 9 to No. 3 on the Network World 200 list. The rest of the 25 most powerful people in networking Main story Builders of the infrastructure Software superheroes Network executive forces The money guySend this article to a colleague
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