4. Searl Tate, Director of Engineering, Paul Hastings, LLP, 19 years in IT

Favorite Product: Riverbed Granite

Riverbed Granite solutions enable the complete virtualization and consolidation of edge applications, servers and storage to the data center, while projecting the applications and data to edge locations where they perform as if they were local. Granite solutions set a new architectural standard for the modern, fluid enterprise and enables complete consolidation. Organizations can now implement a more fluid architecture where application performance is accelerated regardless of location.

Granite will play a major role in a plan by international law firm Paul Hastings to go from 16 data centers to four, said Searl Tate, the firm's director of network engineering, who spoke at the event. Paul Hastings has been working with the product since the alpha testing stage. "The story of consolidation is compelling," Tate said as quoted by PCWorld.