Pulling all-nighters is nothing new for Shaygan Kheradpir. In grad school, he recalls, "Our brains were going all the time." Now CIO of Verizon, he runs his more than 7,000-person IT organization much like a college lab, a fraternity of smart people who welcome the crazy hours. Equally demanding of himself, he seems to have taken Verizon's corporate slogan—"We never stop working for you"—as his personal motto. After putting in a 10- or 12-hour day, Kheradpir's back online every night for three or four hours: IMing his staff, checking the day's business performance metrics, holding conference calls with developers at 11 p.m. (His wife has banned the late-night speaker phone so that she and the kids can sleep.) His people have grown accustomed to his 3 a.m. e-mails and the fact that Kheradpir might want to discuss them by 7 a.m. But even with all that pressure, Kheradpir claims that headhunters have told him that young developers consider a job with Verizon IT to be a prize. Kheradpir believes that's because there's so much going on at Verizon that a bright, fresh-out-of-college programmer can have a big impact on the company right away. (Verizon's annual IT budget hovers around $1.5 billion, which translates into hundreds of ongoing projects—ranging in size from $20,000 to millions—that keep everyone busy.) Last year, Kheradpir's retail systems group implemented 40 major new systems in 40 weeks for his Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) program, even as IT operations cut costs by around $50 million. (Since becoming CIO in 2002, he's reduced the IT budget by one-third.)

Kheradpir pushes so hard because he and Verizon are intent on winning the battle for the digital home, a battle that places IT squarely on the front lines. While competitors are economizing by laying fiber to the curb and relying on traditional copper wire to connect curbside fiber to residences, Verizon spent $1 billion last year to lay fiber all the way to the customer's doorstep; copper be damned. Verizon now offers FTTP in 13 states. And without copper slowing things down (basic DSL over copper maxes out at about 8Mbps), content can now fly into customers' homes at speeds of up to 100Mbps. This move sets Verizon up to trump cable providers by selling supercharged, high-speed, on-demand video. Beyond provisioning and supporting these products and services, Kheradpir and his group are dreaming up new products themselves, such as Iobi, a service that marries the public telephone network with the Internet. Iobi allows customers to link all their devices—home and work phones, PCs, televisions, cell phones and BlackBerrys—so that they can access and control content stored on any single device from whichever one they have at hand. Iobi customers could, for example, use their office PC to screen calls made to their home phone, taking just those they want on their office or cell phone.