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Steve Jobs's medical leave puts the spotlight on the other members of Apple's executive ranks.

Industry observers are looking in particular at chief operating officer Tim Cook, financial chief Peter Oppenheimer and marketing chief Phil Schiller.

Tim Cook
A former Compaq executive, Cook [pictured, top right] has run a lot of Apple's operations for some time. He was also the man the Apple board turned to when Jobs went on leave for cancer treatment in 2004.

Much of Cook's career has been spent in manufacturing and procurement, although he took over responsibility for sales at Apple, before acquiring the chief operating officer role in 2005. In addition to his work at Compaq, Cook also spent 12 years at IBM, where he ran manufacturing and operations for a large part of IBM's PC business.

Peter Oppenheimer
A long-standing finance specialist at Apple, Oppenheimer [pictured, bottom right] started with the company in 1996, serving as controller for the Americas, rising to overall controller, and then taking over as chief financial officer on the retirement of Fred Anderson.

Before arriving at Apple, Oppenheimer was a divisional chief finance officer at Automatic Data Processing.

Phil Schiller
Schiller has long served as Jobs's right-hand man when it comes to pitching Apple products to the public. He has been a frequent participant in Jobs's keynote speeches and has also given some solo talks, most recently at this year's Macworld.

An avid sports fan, Schiller coached an Apple ice-hockey team that took on a side from Sun, among other rivals. In addition to his work at Apple, he served as a vice president of product marketing for Macromedia.

While Cook, Oppenheimer and Schiller will have the highest profiles during Jobs's absence, others will also play key roles. Design guru Jonathan Ive is known as Apple's strongest creative voice after Jobs, while former Target executive Ron Johnson is responsible for Apple's booming network of retail stores.

On the software front, chief software architect, Avie Tevanian, is no longer at the company, but several other software executives remain, including software engineering head Bertrand Serlet and applications chief Sina Tamaddon.