Industry Leaders

Reggie Aggarwal
Founder and CEO, Cvent. A leader in the Indian high-tech world, he heads an 800-plus-person event-management software company that has helped put together more than 275,000 events worldwide.

Deborah H. Alderson
President, SAIC’s Defense Solutions Group. While she oversees a workforce of 12,500, Alderson has made mentoring women a focus of her energies and developed SAIC’s Women’s Network.

Anne Altman
General manager, Global Public Sector, IBM. The experienced IBM leader continues to rise, most recently taking over all of the giant’s public-sector work.

John Becker
CEO, Approva. The company has embraced a lighthearted marketing campaign targeting “control freaks” with its access-control software, which has become the industry standard for most of the large audit firms.

Wes Bush
CEO, Northrop Grumman. The decision by the new head of Northrop to move the company’s headquarters to the Washington area—creating a bidding war among Virginia, Maryland, and the District, eventually won by Falls Church—was a coup. It was also a recognition of the importance of the government IT sector, where Linda Mills heads Northrop’s $8.4-billion-a-year information-systems business.

Teresa Carlson
Vice president, global public sector, Amazon Web Services. The move of the influential vice president of Microsoft Federal Services to Amazon in December showed how seriously the retailer took cloud computing.

Edward J. Casey Jr.
CEO, Serco (North America). A former energy executive, Casey has led Serco through two successful acquisitions since 2006 and has grown the company into more than a billion dollars in revenue.

Michael L. Chasen
CEO, Blackboard. The education-services provider continues to grow, allowing Chasen increasing flexibility to involve himself in other local start-ups and deals.

Pablo Chavez and Mike Bradshaw
Managing policy counsel and director (respectively) of Google Federal, Google. Google’s presence is expanding yearly in Washington—its $5.2 million in lobbying expenses last year was up by nearly a third from 2009. Chavez, a former John McCain aide, is one of the leading Silicon Valley voices on Capitol Hill, and Bradshaw is the face of Google in the federal sector.

Lynda Clarizio
CEO, Invision. The former head of Advertising.com for AOL and a onetime Arnold & Porter lawyer, Clarizio is among the foremost experts on digital advertising.

James F. Coakley
CEO, Power Loft. The Prince William County data center is one of the area’s largest storage facilities and a green model for similar projects.

Matthew J. Desch
CEO, Iridium. As head of one of the world’s largest mobile-satellite companies—relied upon by mariners, explorers, and even the Defense Department—Desch helped take the company public in 2009.

Amr ElSawy
CEO, Noblis. The nonprofit consulting firm—which traces its history to MIT’s World War II efforts to help the government solve complex problems—remains a force in federal circles.

Nelson M. Ford
CEO, LMI. The health-care executive turned undersecretary of the Army now heads the nonprofit management consultancy born of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s frustration with the Pentagon’s business practices 50 years ago.

Linda Gooden
Executive vice president, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions. With more than $10 billion in annual sales, Gooden oversees a business roughly the size of Cambodia’s GDP.

Donald E. Graham
CEO, Washington Post Company. As a regular Facebook user, a board member of the social-media powerhouse, and overseer of the print newspaper business’s transition to a multi-platform media experience, Graham is at the forefront of technological change. Products such as Trove, built by his team and led by CDO Vijay Ravindran, are causing excitement in media circles.

Walter P. Havenstein
CEO, SAIC. The newish leader of the region’s biggest government-technology contractor, with 17,500 local employees, is seen as a breath of fresh air, raising employee morale. He’s also a leader in education, chairing the nonprofit FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

Fred Humphries
Vice president, US government affairs, Microsoft. The top representative of the Redmond, Washington, software giant is, along with Ed Ingle, a powerful voice in DC.

Sudhakar Kesavan
CEO, ICF International. The green-tech consulting firm—perhaps best known for helping launch the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program—has developed into a global leader under Kesavan, who has worked at the firm since 1983 and is now vice chair of NVTC.

Jeong Kim
President, Bell Labs. More than a decade after he made many millions on the sale of his tech start-up to Lucent Technologies, Kim has settled into his role as head of the storied Bell Labs.

Bruce Klein
Senior vice president, US public-sector theater, Cisco. One of the largest providers of networking products to the government, Klein manages an extensive portfolio.

Marne Levine
Vice president, global public policy, Facebook. The arrival of Larry Summers’s chief of staff from the National Economic Council as the social-networking site’s lead policy person shows how seriously the company is now taking Washington.

Mark D. McLaughlin
President and chief executive officer, VeriSign. The Web-security firm’s relocation last summer to Northern Virginia was a sign of the energy in the tech sector regionally.

Donna Morea
President, CGI US, Europe, and Asia. Just about the entire world except Canada now falls under the purview of this 25-year veteran of the IT industry.

Matthew O’Connell
CEO, GeoEye. High-quality satellite images once were the exclusive domain of a handful of governments, but now GeoEye’s work is provided through Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to any computer user in the world.

Gary Shapiro
CEO, Consumer Electronics Association. The longtime head of the powerful trade association is taking a bigger role in policy, arguing in his new book, The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream, that the United States needs to rethink its strategy for economic competitiveness.

David W. Thompson
Cofounder and CEO, Orbital. The commercial space-launch company, which has its own space facility off of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, will grow only more critical as NASA wraps up the space-shuttle program.

Steve Trundle
CEO, Alarm.com. The onetime MicroStrategy CTO now runs a hot security company that allows users to connect to their home security systems remotely.

John B. Wood
CEO, Telos. The head of the cybersecurity firm is proving a key booster of Loudoun County growth with his formation of the local CEO Cabinet to advise policymakers on economic-development issues.