By Kenan Machado and Vivin Mathew, CNBC-TV18

Two Indians have made it to the Forbes' list of 15-top paid young CEOs in the United States. Shantanu Narayen who heads Adobe Systems and Francisco D'Souza, Boss at Cognizant Technology are the men in the list.

44 yr old Shantanu Narayen, who joined Adobe Systems in 1998, earns a cool USD 12 million a year. That puts him in fifth spot in the Forbes list of the 15 highest paid CEOs in the US. Narayen is an electronics engineer from Osmania University in Hyderabad. He followed that up with a Master's in Computer Science from Bowling Green State University and an MBA from Haas School of Business. Before joining Adobe, Narayen worked in Apple Computer and Silicon Graphics. His entrepreneurial streak was evident when he co-founded Pictra, an early pioneer in digital photo sharing through the internet.

Once at Adobe, Narayen handled the company's R&D and sales divisons before staking claim to the corner office. In fact in 2005, Narayen stretched Adobe's products portfolio by co-piloting the USD 3.4-billion acquisition of rival Macromedia. Shantanu Narayen, who holds five patents, was rewarded for his performance in December last year when he was nominated as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Adobe Systems.

The other indian in the bulge bracket CEO list is 39-year-old Francisco D' Souza who heads Nasdaq listed IT company Cognizant. The youngest in the list of 15, Francisco earns USD 3.7 million a year putting him at no. 15. Born in Kenya, D' Souza has a bachelor's degree from the University of East Asia and an MBA from Carnegie-Mellon University. The boyish D' Souza joined Cognizant at its start-up stage in 1994 and in his 14 years with the company he's done it all - sales, global delivery and business development. On January 1 2007, D'Souza was given the best new year gift of all when he was appointed CEO of Cognizant.