CRN February 2021 - Issue 1401

ISSUE 1401 • FEBRUARY 2021

crn.com

CEO OUTLOOK 2021

Writing their next chapter PAGE 16

SECURITY 100

High stakes for solution providers PAGE 56

CLOUD 100

Rising to the occasion NEWS, ANALYSIS AND PERSPECTIVE FOR VARs AND TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATORS

PAGE 64

Rearchitecting IBM IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna is transforming the company into a hybrid cloud and AI powerhouse focused on a $1 trillion market opportunity with a plan to double its revenue with partners over the next three to five years PAGE 8

CHANNEL CHIEFS 2021 Pivoting quickly to meet partners’ needs during the pandemic PAGE 22

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Computer Reseller News

February 2021

Column 78 On The Record

By Robert Faletra

Features 6 Tech10

These 10 startups are tackling a host of new—and persistent— storage problems.

16

CEO Outlook 2021

56

Security 100

72

MSP 500

Rearchitecting IBM

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2020 was one for the history books. The 80plus CEOs who weighed in on our annual survey are now ready to write their company’s next chapter.

Digital transformation and COVID-19 have changed the game.

Here’s who met the challenge.

The value of managed services has never been more evident.

Channel Chiefs The ‘new normal’ ushered in by the pandemic meant solution providers had to quickly shift gears to help their customers— and channel chiefs had to pivot just as fast to meet these changing needs. Here are our 2021 honorees and a shout-out to our Most Influential chiefs.

Cloud 100

For reprints and plaque requests, please contact The YGS Group at 800.290.5460 or http://crnlicensing.com CRN (ISSN 1539-7343), also known as Computer Reseller News, is published 14 times a year (February, April, June, August, October, December and 8 Special Issues) by The Channel Company, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581, and is free to qualified management personnel at companies involved in the reselling/distribution of computers/networking systems, software and services. One-year subscription rates for all others in the United States are $209.00; Canada $234.00. Overseas air mail rates are: Europe $380.00; Mexico/ South America $380.00; Africa $380.00; Asia/Australia $480.00. Please mail all subscription inquiries along with checks or money orders to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581. For renewals or change of address, please include the mailing address label appearing on the front cover of the publication. Periodicals postage paid at Worcester, MA, (and additional offices, if applicable). POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581. FOR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES go to crn. com/subscribe Copyright© 2021 by The Channel Company. All Rights Reserved.

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The cloud took a star turn this past year for its major role in keeping the economy running during the coronavirus pandemic. Here are the infrastructure, monitoring and management, security, software and storage companies that should take a bow.

2/12/21 7:51 AM

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Videos

20 Hot New Products At CES 2021

AWS Channel Chief Doug Yeum On Moving Fast Scan here to watch the video on CRN.com

CRN® Magazine Is Now Available Online • Easily accessed from anywhere • Share articles via email or social media

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March 11 11:30 a.m. – 3:15 p.m. ET

Featured Session & Speakers: Join us on March 11 for XChange+, an interactive virtual event designed to bring the technology channel community together to experience some of the best elements of our traditional XChange conferences, including: Live Keynotes

Ϣ The Channel Evolution: Accelerating the Adoption of the Hybrid Solution Provider Model

Moderator, Blaine Raddon, CEO, The Channel Company

B. Chad LeMaire, President & CEO, CMA Technology Solutions

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Highlighted Keynotes Ϣ The Power of Consistency: How To Achieve Personal and Professional Greatness in the Face of Any Adversity ⚬ Weldon Long, Entrepreneur, Sales Expert, Author Ϣ What Solution Providers Can Learn From the Orlando Magic & NBA’s COVID Response ⚬ Jeff Lutes, VP of Technology, Orlando Magic

Blaine Raddon, CEO, The Channel Company

T E C H 1 0 : STORAG E

Startups Seek To Stand Out With New Ways To Look At Storage These 10 companies are tackling mission-critical business data issues as they build their own momentum

By Joseph F. Kovar

1. AFI SAAS BACKUP SERVICE

6. LIGHTBITS LABS LIGHTOS

Afi develops intelligent data protection technologies for SaaS environments with native support for Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The company enables fullfidelity data protection and security for G Suite and Office 365, leveraging AI to help ensure security, assist with data governance and provide visibility into data.

Lightbits Labs develops software-defined storage technology for target-side NVMe/TCP clustered storage offerings. The company’s LightOS technology provides for high-performance disaggregation of storage from the compute, with advanced flash management technology to extend SSD lifetime along with persistent storage for container load-balancing. The technology is available as software-only, software plus hardware acceleration or a preconfigured appliance.

2. CLOUD DADDY Cloud Daddy Secure Backup provides data backup and disaster recovery, advanced security and information management for managing and organizing backups and scaling via a single pane of glass. Designed for Amazon Web Services environments, it provides cloud-native capabilities including AI alerting, anti-malware and anti-ransomware intelligent threat detection, and infrastructure management to help AWS customers of any size protect and manage data across public, private, government and hybrid clouds.

3. FUNGIBLE STORAGE CLUSTER Fungible is the developer of the Fungible Storage Cluster, a scale-out all-flash, NVMeover-Fabrics disaggregated storage platform.

The company, which in 2019 closed a $200 million funding round, in October unveiled its first line of data-centric platforms, the Fungible Storage Cluster based on its own Fungible Data Processing Unit. The Fungible Storage Cluster is a high-performance, secure, scale-out, disaggregated data storage platform, delivering an unprecedented 15 million IOPS in a 2RU form factor, scaling linearly to 300 million IOPS in a single 40RU rack, and extending further to many racks.

4. GRAX SAAS DATA ARCHIVE The Grax SaaS Data Archive was designed to keep archived data completely accessible in production. The software schedules autoarchiving jobs to manage storage costs and application performance, removes data from an application without removing access, and makes archived data available for reports and analytics, all within Salesforce Einstein environments.

7. MEMVERGE MEMORY MACHINE MemVerge Memory Machine is enterpriseclass software that virtualizes DRAM and persistent memory so that data can be accessed, tiered, scaled and protected in-memory. It is a Linux-based software subscription deployed on a single server or in a cluster. Unlike cache memory, Memory Machine makes 100 percent of the DRAM and persistent memory available for high-performance applications. It also includes memory snapshot and replication for fast recovery in case of a system crash.

8. MOLECULA ENTERPRISE FEATURE STORE The Molecula Enterprise Feature Store provides acceleration and control to extract features, not data, from data sources, and stores them into one centralized feature store that has been optimized for machine-scale analytics and AI. It works with data from a variety of sources including Kafka, MySQL, Snowflake, Cassandra, Teradata, Apache Spark, Parquet, Amazon S3 and Google Big Query.

9. NEBULON CLOUDDEFINED STORAGE The Nebulon Cloud-Defined Storage is on-premises, server-based storage for mission-critical applications managed by the Nebulon cloud. Cloud-Defined Storage combines a cloud-based control plane with PCIe cards in customers’ servers to provide enterprise-class data services for critical applications to address modern workloads like containers and NoSQL databases as well as traditional workloads like VMware and clustered SQL databases.

5. INCOUNTRY

10. STORAGEOS

InCountry develops what it calls Data Residence as a Service to let businesses run best-of-breed SaaS applications with data residency in over 80 countries. Customers’ data can be stored in country of origin or citizenship with end-to-end compliance and audit support with data residency for profile regulation with encryption in both single-tenant and multitenant environments. Accenture is an investor.

StorageOS develops cloud-native storage technology to provide persistent container storage for customers’ stateful applications in production.The software, StorageOS V2.2, delivers rapid failover, replication, in-memory cache, data reduction with access controls, and a rules engine.

When deployed anywhere in a single container, StorageOS dynamically provisions highly available persistent volumes. ■

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C O V E R S T O RY

Rearchitecting IBM

IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna is transforming the company into a hybrid cloud and AI powerhouse focused on a $1 trillion market opportunity with a plan to double its revenue with partners over the next three to five years

By Steven Burke

W

hen EY Global Chairman and CEO Carmine Di Sibio broke bread with IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna last July at a luncheon meeting, the two companies were more “frenemies” than partners.

“It was not a great relationship,” said Di Sibio. “We were more competing than we were friends.” That all changed when Krishna laid out IBM’s new partner ecosystem charge that was taking hold in the wake of IBM’s blockbuster acquisition of Red Hat. “The message I got at lunch was IBM was changing, [going through a] transformation, and the Red Hat acquisition was a big piece of this,” he said.

Di Sibio was impressed and as a result has made a big bet on Krishna and IBM. Now, the New York-based $37.2 billion global consulting powerhouse is aiming to drive $1 billion in revenue from the IBM partnership over the next few years. Di Sibio said he has been heartened by the speed at which Krishna is driving the transformation at IBM. “IBM notoriously has been, I’ll say, moving slower,” he said. “I do think they have changed, and they are changing. I have confidence they are going to move fast.”

The Red Hat deal, in fact, has changed the “culture” at IBM and the ecosystem strategy for the better, said Di Sibio. “Their change in strategy really enabled us to have a different type of relationship,” he said.

Key to building a strong partnership has been Krishna’s technology savvy as a leader, his partnership commitment and the trust that

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has developed between the two executives, said Di Sibio. “Arvind is pretty technical,” he said. “I think he is the right choice for where their strategy is going as they move forward.”

Since that lunch meeting, EY and IBM have combined on a joint go-to-market plan centered on the IBM Financial Services Cloud, combining EY’s financial consulting muscle with IBM’s cloud prowess. The two companies also launched just two months ago EY Diligence Edge, an AI-enabled M&A due diligence platform hosted on IBM Cloud and supported by IBM Watson Discovery.

EY had opportunities to use different cloud providers for EY Diligence Edge but chose IBM because of its hybrid cloud strategy and Watson AI technology as a “differentiator,” said Di Sibio.

He said the IBM technology is helping win M&A customers for EY. “I think Arvind is bringing IBM back to being an innovative technology company based on hybrid cloud,” he said.

The EY partnership is just one piece of Krishna’s bold bet on partners with the company’s biggest go-to-market change in three decades as part of his “maniacal focus” to make IBM the No. 1 provider of hybrid cloud and AI. “I think it’s the biggest change we have made in our go-tomarket [model] in my living memory,” said Krishna, who started his career at IBM in 1990 as a researcher at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center. “If you think about how we pay our people and how we have got clarity on the partners, it is the single biggest change in 30 years on the go-to-market. It is massive.”

For Krishna—the architect of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of

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Red Hat 19 months ago—a new simplified sales structure with a ners in the past. “I would like to see our hybrid cloud platform be renewed emphasis on partners that launched earlier this year is the as big or bigger than any of those. If you take the mainframe, by next logical step in his reinvention of IBM as a cloud superpower. the way, over its 50 years, that is hundreds of billions [of dollars].

It is a transformation that Krishna—who is clearly relishing the You could debate whether it’s trillions [of dollars]. I would like faster pace of change he has driven since taking over the CEO to see our hybrid cloud platform be that big and that sustainable. post on April 6—is “deeply, deeply passionate about.” The new That means sustainable for decades, not just for a few years. That organizational structure is aimed at unleashing a full-fledged IBM is my vision for us and our partners together.” partner ecosystem to win the architectural battle in the cloud with The vision, Krishna said, is for IBM to double its revenue Red Hat OpenShift as the “default choice” for hybrid cloud and AI. with partners over the next three to five years in what he says That means eliminating IBM direct sales competition with partners is a $1 trillion hybrid cloud market. “I want our partners to be through a new simplified sales structure that focuses IBM’s global the best at establishing a hybrid architecture at our clients and direct sales force exclusively establishing an AI footprint on the biggest accounts and at our clients,” he said.

‘I think it’s the biggest change we have leaves the rest of the marmade in our go-to-market [model] in A Win-Win-Win ket—literally 100,000 acKrishna said his philosophy counts that previously were my living memory. If you think on the partner ecosystem manned by IBM sales reps— about how we pay our people value proposition is simple: to IBM ecosystem partners. and how we have got clarity “Anything that succeeds in That new account engageon the partners, it is the single this world has to be a winment model—backed up by biggest change in 30 years on win-win. It has to be good for a $1 billion IBM investment the go-to-market.’ us, it has to be good for the to elevate the role of partpartner, and it has to be good ners—puts solution provid—Arvind Krishna, for the client,” he said. ers on the front lines driving IBM Chairman, CEO Under the new go-to-market cloud consumption with Red model, IBM will go direct to Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud the 500 largest customers seeking an “integrated” set of solutions Paks and IBM public cloud.

Make no mistake about it, said Krishna, the new sales structure, from IBM, said Krishna.

“Segment one we really want to be direct for products,” he said. which has reduced the number of customer groups in IBM from Even in that direct sales large account segment there is still a 50 to just two, has resulted in a sales commission model that is “highly favorable” to the channel. No longer will IBM global “massive market” for the channel given that there is on average $5 direct sales reps focused on the biggest accounts be able to move for build and service on every $1 of products sold, said Krishna.

“There is a certain set of clients where we will largely go direct into the midmarket and get paid a commission on those deals, said Krishna. “You cannot get paid [as an IBM global direct sales for the product sale,” he said. “There is a big role for partners rep] for what is today a midmarket client,” he said of the new around providing, whether you use the word ‘build’ or ‘service,’ IBM internal compensation model. “Suddenly that is a big plus because not every customer has got the capacity or even the for the partner.” Beyond that, there is going to be a large force desire to do it all themselves.”

In the next segment of several thousand accounts, Krishna said, of IBM brand specialists who are going to be paid for working hand in hand with IBM ecosystem partners to drive sales growth IBM will “go somewhat directly, but there is more opportunity for partners, including in the resale of products.” in the partner-led segment, said Krishna.

Beyond those next several thousand accounts, the go-to-market The new go-to-market model marks the first time since taking the helm of Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM that Krishna has put the is completely through partners, said Krishna. “I really want to full weight of IBM’s ecosystem partners behind the hybrid cloud depend only on partners [there],” he said.

Krishna is determined to build a robust ecosystem of partners and AI sales offensive. Krishna, in fact, sees the opportunity for IBM to drive a partner renaissance that harkens back to the working hand in hand with IBM to educate customers on why astronomical sales growth many partners experienced first with the “best architecture for clients” is an IBM Linux Kubernetes IBM’s mainframe platform and then with its deep middleware container platform on-premises and in the public cloud. “If we software portfolio at the turn of the century with offerings like can get that through [to the partners and the market]—which is a massive advantage, we believe, for our clients and our partners— WebSphere, IBM DB2 and Informix.

“We made tens of billions and they made hundreds of millions then there is a lot of money to be made because we are going in aggregate over the decades,” said Krishna, reflecting on IBM’s through this tectonic shift,” he said.

That tectonic shift, said Krishna, is all about driving the next big mainframe and middleware software success teaming with part-

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C O V E R S T O RY paradigm shift in technology. He saw it take place firsthand with the mainframe-based model and then the client/server model and now with a new application modernization revolution through the Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud architecture. This new era will be marked by a pronounced shift from infrastructure to services, said Krishna. “Our partners should be putting their money into build and service as opposed to just infrastructure,” he said.

The Reinvention Of IBM For Krishna, the rearchitecting of IBM’s go-to-market model is the next major step in his reinvention of IBM into a fast-moving, hybrid cloud and AI superpower. That transformation began more than two years ago with Krishna, who was then senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software, working feverishly to close IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, Raleigh, N.C. The Red Hat deal—IBM’s largest deal ever and one of the largest deals in tech history—gave IBM the technology to become a force to be reckoned with in cloud with Linux, containers and Red Hat OpenShift. It also gave IBM a new architectural platform, put

in place by Krishna in his previous role, to break down the longstanding barriers between public and private cloud with a “writeonce, run-anywhere” open hybrid cloud platform architecture.

Krishna’s next audacious move: a plan, set in motion four months ago, to accelerate the hybrid cloud transformation by splitting IBM in two by creating a publicly held spin-off of its behemoth Global Technology Services’ (GTS) managed infrastructure services unit. That managed services infrastructure spin-off—a move expected to be completed by the end of this year—creates a $19 billion business with 4,600 clients that is currently dubbed “NewCo.” It also sets the stage for deeper hybrid cloud partnerships with the channel and a robust Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem.

Now Krishna is putting all the pieces in place to ensure the hybrid cloud partner ecosystem model is a top priority in 2021.

That includes giving IBM Senior Vice President Bob Lord, the onetime former COO of dot-com solution provider darling Razorfish, the task of driving an expanded partner ecosystem to support the IBM hybrid cloud and AI model.

Krishna’s call to action, said Lord, is for him to “step up” and

KRISHNA GRADES IBM’S PERFORMANCE ACROSS THE PARTNER ECOSYSTEM IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna has no problems grading his company’s partnering efforts—including a “very mediocre grade” for its ISV performance.

In the traditional IBM partner channel of VARs, VADs and resellers, Krishna told CRN he gives IBM a “good” grade. He says IBM has “done well” there but “can do a lot more, especially in the midmarket.”

The way Krishna sees it, IBM “does well” in the top Fortune 1000 segment, but “we don’t do so well from 1,000 to 200,000 customers.”

Mapping that account coverage involves looking closely at which products apply to the midmarket segment. “Taking a big mainframe ATM solution” down to the 250,000-account market “makes no sense,” he said. “But maybe taking a call center chat application does make sense.”

As for ISVs—where IBM is making a major push to embed its Red Hat software offerings—Krishna gives IBM a “very mediocre grade.”

“We’re doing reasonably [well] in the first [column] with VARs and VADs, not great, but reasonably [well], but we are doing terribly in the second [ISV column], so we need to go improve,” he said. “That means that is where [you will see] my money, my cloud engagement fund, hundreds of people behind the scenes willing to help the partner.”

In the large systems integrator segment with the likes of HCL, Infosys, Atos, EY and others, Krishna gives IBM a “medium” grade. “It’s hit and miss, some of them we are very good, but many of them we are not,” he said.

As for IBM’s Global Business Services (GBS), Krishna said the aim is to grow “multibillion-dollar GBS practices” implementing solutions with ecosystem players in market segments around companies such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, SAP, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow. An example of the opportunity for partners there, said Krishna, lies in the development of IBM technologies around those companies’ software. For example, IBM is providing its Watson AI capability around ServiceNow. “Once we do that technology integration, that is not confined to Global Business Services,” he said. “Any partner gets access to that.”

That GBS integration is adding to the ecosystem, benefiting IBM VARs, VADs and others in the ecosystem, said Krishna.

The GBS investment will have a “flywheel” impact, positioning IBM as “one of the most open companies” in the hybrid cloud landscape, said Krishna, and bringing a wide range of ecosystem partners to cloud ecosystem players like Microsoft, AWS, ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce.com and others. —Steven Burke

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“really go hard” on building out the Red Hat OpenShift partner ecosystem. That means getting global systems integrators, IBM’s traditional VARs and VADs, ISVs and finally IBM’s Global Business Services group all focused squarely on driving the Red Hat OpenShift cloud model.

The driving force behind the new ecosystem buildout, said Lord, is Krishna’s crystal-clear software vision. “His software vision is so dead-on,” he said. “I have a platform to go talk to each of those four sectors in a way that I could not have done before. This is our hybrid cloud architecture and platform and AI solutions, and this is how you can bring it to market: first, how you bring value to your clients but also how you make money and how you get value out of this whole equation. I think sometimes we may have missed that piece.”

offerings and more capabilities for the channel to go sell,” he said, noting it was the heavy investment in applications that drove IBM AS/400 sales into the stratosphere in the 1990s. “What made that platform and what allowed us to grow the channel ecosystem exponentially was the very significant ISV presence,” he said.

By simplifying the go-to-market model, IBM has unleashed more opportunity for partners in the hybrid cloud/AI market, said Tech Data President of the Americas John O’Shea, a former president of managed services superstar Vology. “The pie for the partner ecosystem just got bigger,” he said. “The pie just grew incrementally. Now it is about all of us jumping in, activating that and taking advantage of that opportunity.”

IBM—under Krishna’s leadership—has put in place the laser focus and sales alignment with the proper compensaIBM Is Putting Its tion model to drive growth ‘Arvind is absolutely the right person to Money Where Its in the Red Hat OpenShift lead IBM as the world goes through this Mouth Is hybrid cloud/AI platform, major [hybrid cloud] technolRich Hume, CEO of Tech said O’Shea. IBM has “gone ogy transition. I applaud the Data, the distribution beall in” on the hybrid cloud work they have done to their hemoth that is mounting transformation that is taking its own $750 million nexthold in corporate America, go-to-market and engagegeneration digital transforsaid O’Shea. ment model. It is as simple as mation offensive focused on “This is huge,” he said.

IBM has ever made it.’ helping solution providers “Think about the shift that —Rich Hume, drive cloud, AI/data analytics Arvind is making with IBM. Tech Data CEO and the Internet of Things, He is betting the house that said Krishna’s go-to-market is what is required. You can’t changes translate into big opbe halfway in. The difference portunities for partners driving hybrid cloud and AI solutions. is IBM is not putting their toe in the water here. They are all in.”

“It is a very bold step, and it clearly will benefit the partners,” said Hume of the new IBM ecosystem emphasis and the simplified Winning The ‘Architecture Battle And Not The go-to-market model. “Under Arvind’s leadership, I certainly see Destination Battle’ them putting their money where their mouth is and investing in C Vijayakumar, president and CEO of global systems integrathe channel to help go drive the change to their new offerings.” tor HCL Technologies, which just passed the $10 billion mark In fact, Hume said, in “traditional IBM style,” the company has in 2020, up from $6 billion in 2016, said Krishna’s technology put together a lucrative incentive stack ensuring that partners who smarts are leading to more opportunities for IBM partners.

“Arvind really wants to win the architecture battle and not the engage and sell IBM offerings will make “good money.”

Hume, who spent 30 years at IBM before joining Clearwater, destination battle,” he said. “Customers can choose the [cloud] Fla.-based Tech Data in 2016, applauded the cultural transforma- destination of their choice, but IBM wants to win the architecture, tion at IBM under Krishna. “Arvind is absolutely the right person which is around open source, hybrid cloud, OpenShift and Red to lead IBM as the world goes through this major [hybrid cloud] Hat. It is a very customer-centric strategy, and the speed at which technology transition,” he said. “I applaud the work they have Arvind is executing is also very admirable.”

Noida, India-based HCL, for its part, is responding with a plan done to their go-to-market and engagement model. It is as simple as IBM has ever made it. They [now] have two major segments, to increase the number of IBM-Red Hat engineers fourfold from and the IBM coverage will be concentrated on the first tier of 1,000 to 4,000 over the next two years as it aims to dramatically customers. The second tier of customers will have the right set scale up the IBM practice.

Many customers simply do not have a full appreciation of the of IBM resources to help drive the business, but there will be a shift toward the channel and a higher reliance on the channel power of the middleware software portfolio that Krishna has pulled together at IBM under the Red Hat open-source banner, ecosystem to drive that business.”

The dramatic investment in ISVs will also benefit partners, said Vijayakumar said. “People have to understand the importance that Hume. “As they invest in bringing more ISVs, it just means more middleware plays in this whole architecture conversation,” he said.

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C O V E R S T O RY Not often recognized is that IBM has what may well be the ternet would be for the world, even though it was five years before largest installed base of middleware software—much of that Netscape would introduce the first internet browser. “For those software acquired by HCL for $1.8 billion in 2018. Modernizing of us in engineering graduate school in this country, we knew the that legacy middleware installed base with IBM-Red Hat is a internet was there,” he said. “huge opportunity” to bring hybrid cloud and AI to customers Krishna decided to focus on wireless networking with a team of with Linux, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible, said Vijayakumar. lab employees. The IBM team put together research prototypes for Backing up the IBM-Red Hat bet with a simplified go-to-market a Wi-Fi network with the idea of supporting billions of endpoints. model is also opening up more opportunities for partners, said “We were talking to the product side of the house and some of Vijayakumar. “I strongly believe this new approach will further them got excited and they said, ‘There is a market for 1,000 of simplify and make it easy and allow us to scale the whole IBM these,’” recalled Krishna. “I looked at them and I said, ‘There is a practice significantly,” he said. market for a billion of these, not for 1,000 of these.’”

The new client engagement model provides a much “clearer” The challenge, of course, was getting the product team at IBM path for partners like HCL to to realize just how big the go to market with IBM, said market opportunity was for Vijayakumar. It also increases Wi-Fi. Krishna saw it as a mat‘I strongly believe this new [go-tothe “addressable market” for ter of building a custom ASIC ecosystem partners. “It gives to dramatically drive down market] approach will further simplify us an opportunity to work the cost of Wi-Fi from thouand make it easy and allow us to scale with a lot of IBM clients,” he sands of dollars to just sevsaid. eral hundred dollars. “People the whole IBM practice significantly. ...

That is a “very, very big” just couldn’t see the market It gives us an opportunity to work with a breakthrough for IBM and [would] be that big,” he said. its partners, he said. IBM has That’s when Krishna realized lot of IBM clients.’ consciously made a choice to he had to play a role in not —C Vijayakumar, focus its direct sales teams on just the technology creation HCL Technologies President, CEO a subset of clients and trustside of the business but as the ing ecosystem partners to head of a business within IBM. work with other clients, said That move from pure techVijayakumar. “I think it’s a nologist to technology entrevery smart strategy,” he said. preneur of sorts led Krishna to realize that to be successful a The way Vijayakumar sees the new strategy is IBM will focus on company needs to have a robust go-to-market model. “My first big the biggest customers looking for an “overall integrated proposi- learning was I have got to straddle both sides, [the technology and tion” from IBM, play a role with a set of customers looking for the business aspects of IBM],” he said. “The moment you begin to “niche” IBM capabilities, but leave the rest of the market to straddle both sides it actually goes straight to this conversation. So ecosystem partners like HCL. even if you build the best technology, how do you get it to market?

Krishna’s passion for partners to succeed is “very, very visible” Who is going to sell it? Who is going to service it? Who can explain in the actions he has taken to improve the IBM partner proposi- the value to the client? Who can help them deploy it? If you don’t tion, said Vijayakumar. “Arvind cuts to the chase very quickly,” get through all those questions, it is a science lab experiment at he said. “He comes to the point. It is very easy to work with him. the end of the day.”

He is extremely client-centric.”

At the same time he was gaining a deep understanding of go-tomarket dynamics, he was also developing a strong sense of driving The Education Of A CEO customer value. That led him to look closely at making sure any Krishna—who grew up in India and came to the U.S. to earn a technology decision was based on customer feedback. “At the end Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at of the day if the client doesn’t see value, they are going to stop Urbana-Champaign—said he was “blessed to have a lot of help paying you for it,” he said. “That was a big learning.” and a lot of mentors” in his journey from a highly respected enAnother big career moment for Krishna came when he began gineer at IBM to the CEO job. It’s a journey that took him from a working with former IBM software executive Robert LeBlanc in young man working on technology breakthroughs to a seasoned the 2001 time frame. At that point, LeBlanc asked Krishna to help builder of businesses, moving beyond technology invention to build a security software business around IBM’s Tivoli systems driving market adoption. management offering. “He took a chance [on me],” said Krishna.

When Krishna first started at the Thomas J. Watson Research “He took this guy who was an engineering guy, who knew how to Center in 1990 he understood just how transformational the in- build product, and said, ‘Come help me build a security business.’”

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LeBlanc gave Krishna carte blanche on whether to build or buy IBM partners said they are excited by the potential for the new IBM’s security portfolio. “That three years was an incredible learn- partner ecosystem model, even though IBM still hasn’t worked ing experience across [all] those different dimensions … including out all the details. Specifically, partners are champing at the bit M&A, including big divestments, including how do you take care to tackle those thousands of new account opportunities that of customers when you do both those things,” he said. were at one time covered by IBM client reps. Key to the client After building the security business, Krishna learned the channel engagement model is specific account sales planning. Partners inside and out when he took are also anxious to get more command of the Informix details on how to work with database business in the midthe multiple IBM technology ‘I think IBM has come to the 2000s. “That’s when I really brand specialists to accelerate conclusion that they want to got to understand the channel sales growth. concentrate their resources on their really, really well because InJohn McCarthy, president formix was almost 90 percent and CEO of Tallahassee, Fla.largest clients and have the channel a channel business—mostly based Mainline Information focus on the balance, which I think is a resellers,” he said. “But evSystems, who over the past positive thing. This really gives us ery one of them had a secret 12 years has built the onesauce. Some could solve a time primarily IBM shop additional focus to double down and problem in their sleep. You into a $1 billion-plus cloud reinvest in the relationship on a would call up these guys best-of-breed solution powgo-forward basis.’ and they could tell you ‘Just erhouse, said he sees IBM’s change this knob and you are new engagement model as a —Joe Mertens, fixed.’ Others would be buildbig change that could provide Sirius Computer Solutions President, CEO ing massive applications on a significant revenue uplift for top of Informix. But the appartners. plication was what the clients “It’s a great strategy and a wanted, not Informix.” great plan,” said McCarthy. “We’ve been with IBM for 33 years, For Krishna, the Informix experience gave him a profound ap- and there is a lot of hope and expectation around this. We’re preciation for how partners of all kinds team with a company like still awaiting the details and looking forward to seeing over time IBM to build a successful business. “Their expertise and [the value whether it develops like we hope it does. It’s no longer about they bring] to the client is what helps us make money,” he said. words. Now it is all about execution.”

“You actually have to cover the gamut [of the partner ecosystem] A big positive sign in the rollout of the new engagement model is to succeed as a business,” he said. the direct involvement of IBM Americas General Manager Ayman Antoun, said McCarthy. “He is one of the architects behind this and Execution Key To Channel Ecosystem is really stepping up to make it happen,” he said. “That’s a big plus Renaissance for IBM. When Ayman gets involved, things get done.”

IBM has already begun communicating about the new go-to-market Mainline has won numerous awards for its solutions strategy— model, pledging to bring more client opportunities, technical including Dell Technologies’ 2020 Growth Partner of the Year resources and support to partners. alongside its 2020 IBM Beacon Award for Most Innovative Client In a memo titled “Elevating IBM’s Partner Ecosystem To Deliver Experience for a DB2 Blockchain solution on the IBM Z mainframe.

Open Hybrid Cloud and AI At Scale,” IBM has promised “more McCarthy said Mainline, which says it holds the largest privately investments in client coverage where IBM sellers are focused on owned customer-facing force of IBM engineers and technologists, jointly selling with partners.” That includes additional demand prides itself on being able to offer the broadest and deepest multigeneration funding and digital campaign capabilities, and an ex- cloud solution set including IBM and IBM Red Hat. “Customers panded cloud engagement fund for supporting partners helping are demanding a best-of-breed solution set,” he said. “We did customers modernize applications. “We’re bringing you more in- 10,000 transactions last year with more than 2,000 customers. vestment, support and opportunities than ever before, and striving They depend on us as a one-stop, end-to-end cloud consultant to do that in a simplified way,” said IBM in the memo to partners. and solutions provider.”

Partners said IBM’s new mantra for partners—“Value to the Joe Mertens, president and CEO of San Antonio-based Sirius clients + Value to partners = Value to IBM”—represents a dramatic Computer Solutions—who has built the onetime IBM-exclusive new recognition of the role partners play. What’s more, they said, provider into a $3 billion national integrator powerhouse, the largthe clarity in the partner model feels like the middleware software est IBM partner in the U.S. and No. 21 on the 2020 CRN Solution sales offensive that was so successful in the ’90s.

Provider 500—said he sees the IBM changes as “good news” for

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C O V E R S T O RY partners. “I think IBM has come to the conclusion that they want to concentrate their resources on their largest clients and have the channel focus on the balance, which I think is a positive thing,” he said. “This really gives us additional focus to double down and reinvest in the relationship on a go-forward basis.”

The new IBM focus on the biggest customers draws a clear line between the IBM and the partner-led accounts, said Mertens.

“Anytime you are a partner and you have a relationship with an OEM, you want to make sure you don’t have to watch your back.

You want to make sure the channel strategy is clear and you know if you engage with them you don’t have to have risk that potentially they could take that transaction direct or through some other alternative route,” he said. “Having clarity to the two different segments should make a real difference in how IBM engages with partners across the country.”

The new strategy also should resolve the differences between the go-to-market models of partner-centric Red Hat and IBM, especially for partners like Sirius, which was a prominent Red Hat partner before the acquisition by IBM. “The challenge historically was that Red Hat’s go-to-market was different than IBM’s go-to-market, even after IBM bought them,” said Mertens. “With these changes they are trying to align the goto-market and bring these two things together, which makes a lot of sense.There were certainly challenges prior to that as to what the right route would be, how to go to market and are you partnering with the Red Hat rep or the IBM rep. All that alignment is what I think these changes are designed to help invigorate.”

Besides the new IBM-Red Hat go-to-market model, Mertens expects the spin-off of NewCo “to reduce potential contention” between IBM and partners that have invested in their own managed services capabilities. “Time will tell, [but] on paper it looks very encouraging. We’ll just have to see how it actually happens over time,” he said.

Mertens complimented Krishna as a “technically astute leader” who has IBM sharply focused on hybrid cloud and multi-cloud.

“He recognizes that to be successful he has got to rely on the channel and engage with the channel, maybe at a higher level than some of his predecessors,” he said.

With Red Hat OpenShift, IBM is pursuing a write-once, run-onmultiple-clouds strategy, said Mertens. “That is a real advantage,” he said. “It’s not to say that their cloud is better or worse than some other public cloud. There are lots of good solutions out there. What Red Hat gives them is an ability to write once and run anywhere, and that is a big deal.”

As far as the bottom-line investment in partners to drive the hybrid cloud sales charge, Mertens said there is certainly a “verbal commitment,” but it is “too early to tell if there is a fiscal commitment.”

One area that is key to success is for IBM to replicate the IBM Garage services effort in which the company helps fund application modernization proofs of concept in the midmarket with partners like Sirius. Right now, IBM Garage is focused on the largest customers.

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“One of the things that I would suggest to IBM is they need to figure out how they fund partners to do those types of proofs of concept for that second segment of customers. … The question is: ‘Is there a way for IBM to help fund those POCs on behalf of the partner?’” said Mertens. That would go a long way toward accelerating the Red Hat OpenShift cloud in the channel, he said.

Mertens said it is still too early to determine ultimately how big an impact Krishna’s new ecosystems model will have, but he is “cautiously optimistic” about the potential for meaningful change. “I am probably more optimistic about IBM’s changes and go-to-market than I have been in many years,” he said.

Mark Wyllie, CEO of Boca Raton, Fla.-based Flagship Solutions Group, one of the early IBM cloud partners that has provided transformative cloud services for both NASCAR and the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, said he expects the new IBM go-to-market model to help drive double-digit sales growth for his company around cloud, Red Hat and security. “We are all in on IBM,” he said. “IBM has the flat-out best products for hybrid cloud, AI and security.” Flagship, in fact, has a compound annual growth rate of 38 percent since making its bet on IBM’s cloud strategy in 2013.

One area where Flagship is leveraging IBM’s cloud and Watson AI prowess is an engagement with the Professional Fighters League (PFL), an up-and-coming mixed martial arts (MMA) league. That involves putting chips in the gloves of fighters and using high-tech glasses worn by referees to transform the ring battle into a fullfledged biometric experience for fans.The PFL is betting the next-gen SmartCage data and analytics will give it a leg up over rival MMA platforms. “This is the kind of technology leadership that separates IBM from the rest of the pack,” Wyllie said. “The Red Hat OpenShift software and architecture increases our addressable market by an order of magnitude.”

Even with the breakthrough IBM technology, Wyllie said, key to success for partners is execution in the field. “I’m optimistic,” he said. “I think our future is so bright we have to wear shades.

Arvind has made the most significant changes at IBM in the last 30 years. If they do this right, it is going to be a huge win for partners, but IBM has to make sure that Arvind’s vision is executed at the street level and that all of the IBMers in the sales trenches are rowing the boat in the same direction as the partners.”

Krishna, for his part, knows that IBM has to make good on the new simplified partner engagement model. “I think it’s a really important step, though, to face up to [the fact] that we can improve dramatically on our channels,” he said. “You need to acknowledge it first. Otherwise, you just keep trying to make incremental innovations.”

Incremental innovation certainly is not the aim of Krishna, who is driving an audacious reinvention of the 110-year-old company to capture the No. 1 position in hybrid cloud and AI. That means rearchitecting the company he loves to make it much easier for partners to do business and succeed with IBM. “What should it lead to?” Krishna asks. “It should lead to a lot more opportunity for our partners to sell and to make money.”

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C O V E R S T O RY Krishna’s Call To Action: ‘Clarity In Incentives, Clarity In Segmentation And Clarity In Tools’ IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, who will celebrate his first year as CEO on April 6, speaks with CRN about the company’s $1 billion partner ecosystem bet and what the blockbuster SolarWinds breach means for the industry. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.

How do you see IBM growing business for itself and the partner base?

Anything that succeeds in this world, it has to be a win-win-win. It has to be good for us, it has to be good for the partner, and it has to be good for the client. In the end, there is somebody who writes a check.

So if I step back and look at it today, I would tell you there is a certain set of clients where we will largely go direct for the product sale. There is a big role for partners [there] around providing, whether you use the word ‘build’ or ‘service,’ because not every customer has got the capacity, or even the desire, to do it all themselves. That’s a massive market out there because there is $5 in build and service for every $1 of the product sale.

Then if I say if I go beyond and resegment it where you have the top 500 where we will tend to want to go a lot with our people, there is a huge opportunity for build and service.

Then you say there is the next few thousand, where we will go somewhat directly, but there is more opportunity for partners, including in the resale of products. And everything after that I really want to depend only on partners.

How does the new sales structure going from 50 client engagement groups to two groups impact incentives and compensation?

Consistency. [In] segment one we really want to be direct for products. [In] segment, I’m calling it 2A, yes we have a lot of direct coverage, but there is this precise role for partners.

Everything after that the partner wins. … Then the incentives are clear. If you go here, that is your incentive and it is completely consistent.

I am going to invest in tools also. So by the middle of this year, we will be done with our Salesforce implementation.

So there will be much cleaner tools for you to use as a partner also.

So all of that means clarity in incentives, clarity in segmentation and clarity in tools so that we can begin to collaborate much better than through spreadsheets and older tools.

What has happened with the internal compensation with the IBM sales force? Is it neutral or favorable to the channel?

Highly favorable to the channel, so the people who get paid in what I call segment one, that individual cannot be paid in segment two. So it used to be that we often had people blended, where somebody could go across [those segments]. …

They might cover some upper-end clients and they also might cover some lower-end clients.

Now if I say you only call on my big clients, you cannot get paid for what is today a midmarket client, suddenly that is a big plus for the partner because there is nobody who can be in there, saying, ‘No, no, no, let me take it direct because then I can get paid more.’ That human doesn’t exist.

You have to take away the opportunity for it to get blended across those three different models. I think that is a plus.

That is not a neutral. And by the way there is a certain set of people who only get paid when it goes through a partner.

Was IBM impacted by the SolarWinds attack? What do you make of the cybersecurity threat landscape?

I don’t want to get deep into SolarWinds. Let me just put it this way: First of all, I feel sorry for them because it was a really sophisticated and vicious attack. It went on over a long period of time. So, to the best of our knowledge, we were not impacted. I’ll just leave it at that.

Do we all have to do a lot of work? You always should be paranoid. You always should be very, very careful. Now, that said, we have done secure engineering practices for multiple decades.

Secure engineering practices are fundamental to us [at IBM]. It’s how we build our mainframe. It’s how we build our software. It’s how we build Linux. So you’ve got to go do that.

It’s a massive investment, by the way. If I took away that investment I would probably add multiple points to IBM’s bottom line. But I would then be afraid that if something happens maybe the whole business goes away. So, it’s a huge cost of doing business. I think cybersecurity is going to be the biggest issue of the next two decades. ■

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CEO Outlook 2021

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f there’s one thing CEOs across the IT industry agree on, it’s that 2020 is going to be a hard year to forget.

Starting with the global COVID-19 pandemic that left few, if any, businesses untouched and ending with the massive SolarWinds data breach that dragged the U.S. government, multiple technology vendors and thousands of customers into its net, the impact of 2020 will be felt long into the new year.

Those effects will have tremendous influence on the technology decisions being made in 2021, according to the more than 80 high-tech executives who weighed in on CRN’s annual CEO Outlook survey. As customers continue adapting to the “new normal” that requires them to support a more distributed workforce, face increased security threats and compress their digital transformation timelines, opportunities abound for IT vendors and the channel

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partners that work with them to build new solutions that meet these needs.

“We know customers are still trying to understand some of the longer-term effects of the pandemic. Our customers span every industry, so each of them is dealing with a different level of complexity, and they are all at different stages in their digital transformation journey,” said Chuck Robbins, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif., in his survey response. For the networking giant, that means Cisco this year will focus on helping customers “reimagine their applications, secure everything, transform their infrastructure and empower their teams.”

Those trends were echoed throughout the survey. Read ahead for a look at how some CEOs are tackling the opportunities and challenges in 2021 and visit CRN.com/CEO-outlook to see all of the responses.— Jennifer Follett ■

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What’s the biggest market opportunity you and your channel partners will tackle together in 2021?

Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO, Zoom During the next year, organizations large and small worldwide will decide what type of work model they’ll adopt for their employees—those models may be fully remote, completely in the office or a hybrid. As these decisions fall into place, organizations will need technology to support their collaboration and communications needs. We’ll work closely with all of our channel partners … to help enable and train them to deliver solutions for the new work-from-anywhere collaboration and communications economy.

Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Fortinet The smartest organizations are using this period as an opportunity to invest in long-term innovation, including in advanced technologies like SD-WAN, SASE and zero trust networks. The key to the right investments for these organizations is thinking about security and networking as a converged solution, or security-driven networking.

Lisa Su, President and CEO, AMD Last year we all experienced first-hand the increasingly important role technology plays in every aspect of our lives. … from how we worked, to how our kids learned, or how we shopped and were entertained. And highperformance computing is at the center of those devices and experiences. The biggest market opportunity for AMD and our partners is to combine the significant performance advances in our latest products with our partners’ expertise to bring solutions to market that help businesses accelerate their digital transformations.

Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO, Palo Alto Networks Two events are top of mind with boards and business leaders as we start this year. The pandemic and its consequences is the obvious backdrop. The second is the SolarWinds attack. Both have cemented with leaders that security is a top imperative. The pandemic underscored how a secure, large-scale shift to remote work may have saved their company. [The] SolarWinds [attack] is now making them realize that an absence of modern, automated real-time visibility into their data and applications can potentially bring that company down. … Partners are instrumental. They help drive scale and the successful deployment and consumption of our technologies by delivering and integrating our technologies or by bringing high-value services and solutions to customers.

Paul Cormier, President and CEO, Red Hat At the end of the day, the market opportunity for both Red Hat and our partners is working with our common customers to get to a truly open hybrid cloud environment. That has not changed. Many of our partners started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and then Red Hat OpenShift, but we’ve worked hard with them over the years to stretch that across an open hybrid cloud architecture, which is now the new data center. The opportunity now is bigger than ever.

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CE O OUTLOOK 2021 How are you changing your channel and technology strategies in 2021 to reflect the impact of the ongoing global pandemic?

Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems We’ve invested in the Digital Experience platform, which we launched last fall, and our partner-driven Webex solutions targeting specific industries, especially those impacted by the pandemic like health care, education and government. We’ve also identified a number of key technology trends that have emerged due to the pandemic, such as the increased adoption of cloud, the shift to hybrid work and the transition to 5G. With these in mind, we’re in the process of rolling out a new three-year strategy to address our joint customers’ needs and help them modernize their infrastructure to remain agile and resilient moving forward.

Kris Hagerman, CEO, Sophos We know from our threat research that cybercriminals are not slowing down during the pandemic. In fact, cybercriminals are stepping up their game, especially with new ransomware techniques. Sophos will continue with its ‘Channel Best’ strategy to provide the industry’s best cybersecurity solutions, technical expertise, and deep knowledge of the changing threat landscape and security trends—all built from the ground up with the channel top of mind. … With COVID vaccines helping people slowly return to brick-and-mortar offices during the year, partners will need to be prepared to secure customers’ migration back into the office—and to help manage a hybrid remote/physical presence that is likely to persist.

Tami Erwin, CEO, Verizon Business Here’s how our channel strategy will be different than the past. First, it will be digitally driven. We will bring together our processes and operations and, as many of our customers are doing, digitally transform our operations. Next, a centralization of our business functions. We have brought together all channel resources and functions across our business into a single team. ... We are committed to our channel partners so that they can create and deliver innovative solutions—all running on the Verizon awardwinning 4G LTE network and the fastest 5G network in the world.

Greg Clark, Co-Chairman and CEO, Forescout Technologies We believe the opportunity for partners is bigger than ever, which is why Forescout is doubling down on its channel strategy in 2021. This includes extensive investment in our technology across emerging areas like cloud, segmentation, operational technology and Enterprise of Things security. These are all areas [where] partners have immense opportunity to advise customers and make money in 2021. We will be updating our program to make it more predictable, straightforward and profitable for partners.

Tony Thomas, CEO, Windstream Enterprise The global pandemic hasn’t necessarily changed our strategic focus—but it has accelerated the pace at which we execute on it. With such a high percentage of the workforce moving to a remote work scenario seemingly overnight, the need for solutions that allow collaboration from anywhere has accelerated.

Windstream Enterprise has scaled up our efforts accordingly to provide our customers the flexibility they need in their new environment, and we have aligned our channel sales strategy and incentives around that need.

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What are the biggest technology investments you are making in 2021?

Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies We are ready to grow in the core, multi-cloud and edge, and with a completely modernized set of solutions that will be the foundation of the AI- and 5G-enabled future. We have an extraordinary opportunity as technology drives society forward and Dell Technologies fulfills its role as the essential technology company for the data era.

We know how to get technology into the real world at scale, providing a consistent approach to infrastructure, data, applications and security across the entire environment from multiple clouds to the edge.

Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage Our vision is to fundamentally change our customers’ expectations for data and storage management for them to provide data storage to their developers as code. We will help fuel their data-driven innovation and free up their time and money by automating sophisticated data management operations. Our biggest bets will enable code-based, real-time access to resilient hybrid cloud data storage for developers and DevOps alike.

One step in this direction is [storage management product] Pure1’s AI-driven workload planner to help customers place workloads on the right storage service tier quickly and with minimal input and oversight.

Enrique Lores, President and CEO, HP Inc. One of the most significant areas of investment is in continuing to strengthen our digital infrastructure.

This is a big part of our new HP Amplify partner program, with a focus on simplifying complexity, unlocking insights, providing new tools, and enabling data-sharing across companies to better serve customers and accelerate growth. This is going to make it easier for partners to both do business with HP and to meet the needs of their customers.

William Stemper, President, Comcast Business Comcast Business continues to invest heavily in all aspects of our business, and we have a special emphasis on a new back-office solution we call Orion that will be a huge benefit to our partners. Orion will provide a seamless way to rapidly solve customer issues, provide a unified billing system and increase overall ease of doing business with us.

William H. Largent, Chairman and CEO, Veeam Software In 2021, we continue to invest in our cloud solutions for [Amazon Web Services], [Microsoft] Azure, Google Cloud and Office 365 data protection. This year, security is also having us focus on immutable data storage for resilience against ransomware and other threats. Lastly, containers and Kubernetes are investments against the future wave of application development and delivery.

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CE O OUTLOOK 2021

What do you see as the biggest challenges facing customers in 2021?

Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO, Arista Networks We are all recovering from a once-in-a-hundred-year pandemic, and I believe that 2021 will be the year of recalibration for our customers. Many old habits can now be broken, and strategies customers were unable to realize due to COVID-19 can now be implemented in a phased, thoughtful manner. Customers can move their networks from tactical incrementalism to innovation.

George Kurtz, Co-Founder, President and CEO, CrowdStrike I [recently] met with 100 customers and prospects in 100 days and heard unequivocally that organizations are looking for a modern, identity- and workloads-centric zero trust security strategy to lay the foundation for their security transformation. As traditional firewalls continue to be ineffective against modern-day attacks, endpoint and identity protection is of the utmost importance and can be the most challenging for organizations to secure. CrowdStrike closes these gaps for organizations, moving away from ineffective and disparate legacy technologies to prepare organizations for the cloud era.

Jay Chaudhry, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Zscaler Last year’s rapid changes to ensure both employee safety and maintaining business continuity stretched resources very thin. As a result, we anticipate cost-cutting will become more prevalent with customers in 2021. This includes reducing physical spaces (and the accompanying contracts and costs associated with them), making temporary work-from-anywhere programs permanent, and supporting rapid business changes by simplifying complex networks and infrastructure. ... Organizations will be forced to move beyond the perimeter and transform legacy network security to a zero trust architecture securely connecting people and applications.

Jim Chirico, President and CEO, Avaya I think the last year has created a lot of wear and tear on customers and their employees. No matter where you live, no matter what industry, no matter the job responsibility, everyone has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. I am optimistic that we’ll start to turn the corner in the next couple of quarters, and companies will have to be ready for this next ‘phase’ of the new normal, which requires that they move from mitigating the impacts of remote work to seizing on the advantages and opportunities not just for their own employees but for the way they work with their customers. Positive customer and employee experience will become even more critical success factors and real differentiators for our customers.

Ted Schuman, Founder and CEO, PlanetOne In 2021, we’re going to see more investment in tech, but also an inventory and reconciling of what’s been bought and what’s left to purge, procure and secure. All the technology is on the table. The partners need to split into 10 versions of themselves to ensure customers are not making business decisions without their line of sight and influence.

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What is the key to success for your channel partners in 2021?

Antonio Neri, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Today, more than 70 percent of the applications and data still reside in a data center—not in a public cloud—and more applications and data are moving to the edge, the place where we live and work. This is why the world is hybrid. Customers want the agility and simplicity of the cloud-native world and the flexibility and control of a hybrid business model. ... Our channel partners not only have a distinct market advantage with selling HPE GreenLake, but we are focused on making it profitable for them with a host of learning and enablement opportunities, and competitive rebates.

Yang Yuanqing, Chairman and CEO, Lenovo Channel partners will succeed with us by focusing on three key areas this year: The first is by providing a best-in-class customer experience. Solution providers offer customers a lot of value through their engagement and support. Overindexing on this area is critical in this environment. The second is by assessing and providing a full suite of products, solutions and services to their customers that solves business challenges. ... The third is growing recurring revenues to establish a repeatable model for growth beyond 2021. Moving more and more of their business decisions to Lenovo’s ‘Channel First’ approach will increase partners’ relevancy to their customers as competitors [are] moving to doing business direct with customers.

Rich Hume, CEO, Tech Data The key to success for our channel partners lies in taking advantage of the areas where tactical opportunities will emerge throughout the year. We predict some of these areas will include the workplace, the emergence of the pent-up data center demand post-COVID, the increasing proliferation of as-a-service business models, and both tactical and long-term opportunities around cloud, security, analytics and IoT technologies. It’s critical for every partner to determine how they will invest to participate in these areas as we move toward the postpandemic marketplace.

Orion Hindawi, Co-Founder and CEO, Tanium I believe 2021 will be remembered as a year where more was asked of channel partners than ever before.

Customers will be leaning on partners to determine what technology is running on endpoints and help clean up environments infected from Solorigate and its continued fallout. In addition, partners will be asked to help shore up their customers’ foundational cybersecurity posture so they’re ready for whatever may come next. I’d encourage partners to spend as much time as they can to become technically capable and knowledgeable about the solutions and services customers need to maximize their investment. Partners have a huge opportunity to be the expert—which will drive additional business for their company.

Fred Voccola, CEO, Kaseya The outlook for MSPs in 2021 looks very promising for those that create strong go-to-market strategies that clearly articulate the value of what they provide to stand out from the competition. Additionally, MSPs that use integrated solutions and prioritize automation in their service delivery framework will see success in 2021, as they can more easily scale their business up or down based on customers’ needs as the economy changes.

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2/11/21 3:39 PM

CHAN N E L CH I E FS

Pivoting Quickly To Meet Partners’ Needs

By Rick Whiting

T

he IT industry began 2020 with high expectations as the economy held steady and global IT spending was forecast to grow 3.4 percent to $3.9 trillion. Channel executives at the IT industry’s leading companies geared up for a year of working with solution providers to help businesses and organizations with “big idea” projects like digital transformation and cloud migration.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic began its surge around the world, and everything changed. Solution providers had to quickly shift gears in the face of the new normal—and channel chiefs had to pivot just as fast to meet the changed needs of their channel partners.

“It’s been a year that doesn’t relate to any other year, previously, at all,” said Colleen Kapase, vice president of worldwide partner and alliances at fast-growing data cloud company Snowflake.

Kapase and Philip Larson, senior director of worldwide partner programs, were gearing up for the launch of the company’s Snowflake Partner Network as the pandemic hit. The debut of the company’s inaugural partner program went on in June as scheduled, but with all their events held virtually.

Imperva, meanwhile, had planned a number of live regional partner meetings and roundtables for 2020. Those were transformed into virtual roundtables, where channel managers listened to executives from 10 or 12 top partners, and a halfdozen webinars where Imperva’s top executives provided partners with executive briefings on business and technology plans.

“Faced with the pandemic challenge, we decided early on

8x8

Accedian

Acer America

Acer America

Acronis

SVP, Global Channel Sales

VP, Global Enterprise, Channel Sales

VP, U.S. Channel

VP, U.S. Commercial Sales

VP, GM, Americas

John DeLozier

DeLozier is a key member of the 8x8 senior leadership team and has received countless awards in the channel community. He designed the new 8x8 Open Channel Program globally. And, importantly, he did not miss any company goals.

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to shift to a virtual partner model,” said Kirt Jorgenson, senior director of global channel marketing and programs, pointing to Imperva’s partner engagement, enablement, training and demand generation operations.

Channel executives also had to adjust to shifts that partners were seeing in their own businesses. Finding it more difficult to recruit new customers, Imperva’s partners focused more on deepening their relationships with existing customers and selling them a broader portfolio of products and services, Jorgenson said.

“One thing we consistently heard from our partners was that customers were accelerating their transformation to the cloud,” Jorgenson said. “In pre-pandemic, everybody had a plan to do that, but maybe in 18 months to three years. We’re seeing a big acceleration of that.”

Communications and collaboration software developer CoreDial saw a surge in demand as work-from-home took hold. But customers in some hard-hit industries, such as hospitality, implemented workforce cutbacks and found themselves with more UCaaS seat licenses than they needed.

CoreDial’s channel managers implemented a plan that allowed channel partners to “pause” billing those customers for temporarily unused seats—rather than shut them off entirely.

“That gave partners the ultimate flexibility,” said Chief Revenue Officer Ken Lienemann.

Here we present the 2021 Channel Chiefs. Our 50 Most Influential Channel Chiefs of 2021, designated with a star on the following pages, are an elite group drawn from the larger pool of honorees. ■

Sergio Bea

Bea ensured that Acced i a n ’ s new S aaS Hosted Service was partner-ready, influencing the R&D organization to include multitenancy capabilities and the launch of a specific partner demo instance of its platform in the cloud.

Philip Burger

Acer recognized a massive opportunity in select verticals with new workfrom-home dynamics.

Burger was aggressive early on in helping Acer with inventory planning as it ramped up incoming shipments to meet increasing demand.

Jennifer Wadland

Wa d l a n d has been with Acer for more than 16 years. In 2020 she helped design and implement vital channel programs for the company, including the Elite/Alliance VAR Program. She also added a new program, the Select VAR Program.

Patrick Hurley

Hurley has overseen the Americas sales business for the past 12 years. He has a track record of cultivating successful sellers and driving accountability across an organization consisting of inside and outside sales professionals.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Acronis

Acumatica

Adlumin

ADT Cybersecurity

Adtran

Chief Channel Evangelist

VP, Partner Strategy, Programs

VP, Worldwide Channels

Channel Director

Enterprise Channel Manager

Amy Luby

Geoffrey Ashley

Jim Adams

Jon Kabrud

Patrick Foster

Luby is driving a global channel community engagement strategy. She has grown Acronis’ “Modern MSP” Facebook group to over 1,000 members and is engaging the channel community across LinkedIn, member communities and peer groups.

Ashley has led Acumatica’s global expansion with key additions in the U.K., Africa, Sri Lanka and South America. With the outbreak of COVID-19, he immediately implemented programs that assisted partners in finding leads.

Adams’ priority after joining Adlumin was to launch the Adlumin Advantage Program. It is focused on ease of use, value delivered to customers and profitability for partners. It includes deal registration/protection and a partner portal.

In Kabrud’s first six months leadi n g A DT ’ s MSP channel, he established field engagement and partner support processes, built a Partner Advisory Council, launched a three-tier partner program with benefits and ramped up partner recruitment.

A s Fo s t e r moved into his new role, he has embraced every opportunity to communicate to partners the key changes being made to Adtran’s Channel Partner Program, the enhanced benefits they can expect and plans for future enrichment.

Agari

AireSpring

Akamai

Alert Logic

VP, Worldwide Channels

SVP, Channel Sales

Global VP, Channels, Alliances

Alcatel Lucent Enterprise

Tracy Pallas

John Young

Micheal McCollough

Chad Bacher

Gene Hawks

SVP, GM, Global Channels

Head of Channels, North America

Based on P a l l a s ’ experience and partner networks, Agari continues to fortify the technical road map and enhance all products to fit better into MSP infrastructure. This has allowed Agari to diversify the routes to market.

Y o u n g expanded the regional channel strategy by hiring a director of partner programs and increasing the channel team. He signed contracts with three large master agents that are bringing in more enterprise-size deals.

McCollough developed an enablem e n t program to give partners advanced capabilities to deliver services. He also launched the Akamai Partner Program and crossed over $1 billion in annualized revenue via the channel.

H a w k s revamped the VAD strategy and simplified deal registration to provide more profitability to partners. He also increased partner profitability with new logo programs across all products and services.

B a c h e r h e l p e d design a simpler model for M S Ps, working closely with them to identify how to “SOCenable” their NOC and put the right operational processes in place to best meet their customers’ security needs.

Amazon Web Services

Anaplan

APC by Schneider

AppDynamics

Appgate

Doug Yeum

VP, Worldwide Partner Organization

Shannon Sbar

VP, Americas Channels

SVP, Global Channels, Alliances

Yeum implemented a new operating model to move faster in delivering globally consistent partner recruitment, enablement and optimized co-sell support for partners by integrating the partner success teams into the field sales teams.

Th a r p l e d his team and partners to launch new routes to market, including solutions and Anaplan’s first MSP trials. This will continue the company’s growth trajectory and create new opportunities for Connected Planning.

Sbar took steps to overhaul APC’s current discount program and make adjustments to ensure partners were receiving the discounts they needed so they and their customers were getting the best solutions within their budgets.

Javens’ team grew revenue touched

by Americas partners 23 percent in two years and drove growth to 30 percent of the overall business.

She champions diversity through her focus on internal women’s and career development programs.

Gravel created a new program called the Sentinel Program, with rewards based around learning and a heavy focus on community. Advisers and analysts have noted that this is something they haven’t seen in the channel in a long time.

Apstra

Arctic Wolf

Arctic Wolf

Area 1 Security

Area 1 Security

Sr. Manager, Channels

VP, Americas Channels, Program

SVP, Global Channels

Chief Revenue Officer

Director, Channel

Head of Global Partner Organization

Kevin Knell

Knell took inventory of the Apstra program, collateral and website and implemented changes. He created a company commitment to the channel as the route to market and instituted an aggressive margin-generating discount structure.

David Tharp

Will Briggs

One of Briggs’ accomplishments in 2020 was gaining depth with top partners. Understanding their business better helped immensely when Arctic Wolf moved to virtual interactions due to COVID-19.

Electric

Rebecca Javens

Tina Gravel

VP, Channels

Bob Skelley

Skelley is focused on developing the company’s international distribution strategy and partner ecosystem. In 2020, he delivered keynote presentations to partners aimed at helping them understand strategic opportunities for growth.

Steve Pataky

Dawn Ringstaff

P a t a k y brought a set of proven blueprints for quickly transforming what was primarily a direct touch go-to-market strategy into a true partner-forward, fully integrated motion that provides opportunity for the channel and Area 1 to grow together.

Ringstaff established the Area 1 Partner Program, initiated partner recruitment and built on-boarding programs and tools. Her efforts have resulted in the recruitment of 40 partners within the first quarter of launch.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics

Business Development Director, ECS

Marketing Manager, ECS

Director, Business Development, ECS

Director, Networking, Security Sales, ECS

Mike Baker

Janna Neequaye

George Williams

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company Donna Grothjan VP, Worldwide Channels

Baker led Arrow’s initiatives in North America to expand its line card with emerging technologies in areas such as DevOps, data intelligence and security to help connect partner and supplier ecosystem with next-gen players.

As the world experienced a big shift in 2020, Neequaye sought to provide resources and services to support partners. Her team created virtual events and a remote collaborative working solutions portal filled with webinars and articles.

W h i l e realigning her team to support goto-market strategy and complement supplier field alignment, Psaltis achieved doubledigit growth and increased total channel partners transacting across the data center portfolio.

After joining Arrow in mid-2020, Williams reimagined the go-to-market for the networking and security business, including how to show up for partners.

The new strategy sets up Arrow to deliver accelerated growth in 2021.

Grothjan led Aruba’s efforts to transform the partner base to enable the delivery of XaaS/NaaS offerings.

She has transformed the partner go-to-market strategy and all aspects of partner enablement and sales capabilities.

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company Jim Harold

Aryaka

AT&T

AT&T

Atlassian

SVP, Worldwide Channels

President, National Business, Channels

SVP, Portfolio Integration, Partner Solutions

Global Head of Channels

H a r o l d led efforts in North America to restructure the channel organization to better support partners.

He adjusted the channel coverage model so channel account managers are able to deliver better planning and accountability.

Scott quarterbacked Aryaka’s transformation into a channel-led business with an integrated revenue model. He created compensation models that focus people resources around partners and mitigate channel conflict.

Marx knew that with nearly 30 million small businesses in the U.S., it would be impossible for a singular sales approach to cover the entire market. She helped transform the sales model with a renewed focus on indirect channels.

Rao has launched new programs that provide revenue growth opportunities and allow solution providers to focus on their core business while opening doors to new IoT, cybersecurity and Wireless WAN opportunities.

Partners play an integral role in Atlassian’s strategy to grow and support enterprise customers. Musierowicz ensures partners can deliver consulting and implementation services based on a solution-led and cloud-first approach.

Augmentt Technology

Automation Anywhere

Avalance Global Solutions

Avalara

Avaya

SVP, Partner Management

SVP, Global Channels

Co-Founder, CEO

SVP, Global Channel Partners, Alliances

Manan Shah

Founder, CEO

Olen Scott

VP, North American Channels

Derik Belair

Derek Toone

Stacey Marx

Sarita Rao

Greg Chapman

Martin Musierowicz

Dennis Kozak

Belair’s experience has been in building and selling IT management solutions to MSPs, and he has seen the adoption of SaaS and the challenges it poses to MSPs. To address these, he co-founded Augmentt in early 2020.

Toone created the Global Alliance Partner strategy and rolled it out to select partners. He initiated collaboration between global systems integrators and Tech Alliance partners to create joint offerings.

Shah last year led Avalance G l o b a l Solutions’ launch of AI-based threat logic and continuous testing to ensure that teams are always prepared to properly handle security incidents.

Wi t h t h e rise of e-commerce, Chapman turned marketplace tax complexity into opportunity. He created a global marketplace development team that focused on monetizing growth and driving value creation across relevant Avalara services.

Avaya Cloud Office helps customers by enabling voice calls, team messaging, meetings, conferencing and file sharing in a single offering.

Kozak helped Avaya more than double the number of customers and partners/ agents selling the offering.

Axcient

Axonius

Bamboo Systems

Barco

Chief Revenue Officer

VP, Worldwide Channels, Alliances

Visit crn.com for a more detailed look at each of our honorees

Chief Marketing Officer

VP, Channel Sales

Charlie Tomeo

Tomeo delivered a new partner portal, invested in the partner program and launched Direct to Cloud. He delivered on Axcient’s promise to provide an excellent experience for partners while enabling them to “Protect Everything” for their customers.

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Jennifer Psaltis

Mark Daggett

Daggett launched a formal channel program from the ground up, including partner strategy, partner portal, deal registration, sales enablement and partner acquisition process. Axonius has now more than tripled partner-driven revenue.

Victoria Grey

Grey has launched Bamboo’s Channel Partner Program. She constructed it to offer generous margins, deal registration, live/ online training, sales and technical support as well as provide a dedicated partner portal for easy management.

Kurt DeYoung

D e Yo u n g implemented a new partner program, taking a more granular approach in building it. He focused on the partner quality level and the ability to take products to market, rather than driving scale through the sheer number of partners.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/11/21 4:00 PM

CHANNEL CHIEF

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Barracuda Networks

Barracuda Networks

BeyondTrust

BigID

Binary Defense

VP, MSP Strategic Partnerships

Sales VP, Americas Channels, Field Operations

VP, Global Alliances, Channels

VP, Worldwide Channel

VP, Global Channel Sales

Neal Bradbury

Dee Dee Acquista

Louise Cooke

Jack Jackson

Bradbury d e m o n strates an unwavering commitment to driving success for Barracuda’s MSP partners.

He has played a key role in helping Barracuda’s partners, and their MSP peers, solve their most pressing security challenges.

Lindsey has enabled partners to sell the company’s advanced email security and network connectivity offerings, which have risen to the forefront during the pandemic. Partners are helping customers solve complex problems in innovative ways.

Acquist a’s focus was on solidifying the strategy of leveraging the power of the channel for growth and scale by finding new business opportunities. She executed several projects to streamline and enhance the partner experience.

Cooke has been instrumental in enabling the best-suited channel partners to be able to strategically position the BigID platform to end users through engagement, training and channel-focused resources.

Jackson joined Binary Defense in December 2019 and quickly built a go-to-market strategy that helps channel partners grow more quickly by giving them the tools and training to provide best-in-class cybersecurity solutions to customers.

Bitdefender

Bitdefender

Bitdefender

Bitglass

BitTitan

Sr. Manager, Worldwide Partner Program

Global VP, Cloud, MSP Channel

VP, North American Sales

VP, Worldwide Channels

Director, Global Channel Sales

Raluca Avram

Jason Eberhardt

Brian Vasiloff

Jon Peppler

Lon Clark

Avram was avid to discover where partners’ focus was in order to help them grow, and she delivered best-in-class support for their go-to-market initiatives. Her objective was to enhance their digital transformation journeys.

Eberhardt was able to increase profitability during the pandemic, as Bitdefender not only did not lose revenue but actually grew.

He also created different go-to-market plans for each partner.

Vasiloff refined the partner engagement strategy with a focus on aligning internal processes, people and systems in North America to support the channel by protecting partner margins and reducing friction.

2020 was the year Peppler built the path to go from “channel optional” to “100 percent channel.” This included defining the channel program, documenting the rules of engagement, building a team and leveraging distributors.

To respond quickly to the pandemic, Clark’s team started brainstorming with distributors the idea of sharing partner segmentation. They identified partners to provide the appropriate messaging and support based on their sales capabilities.

BitTitan

BlackBerry

Blokworx

BlueVoyant

bvoip

VP, Global Marketing

VP, Global Channel Sales

Head of Partnerships, Alliances

CEO

Pam Cory

Colleen McMillan

Robert Boles Founder, President

Steve DeSantis

George Bardissi

Cory did an analysis of marketing and sales i n c e n tive programs and implemented a channel marketing strategy to achieve revenue growth for BitTitan and its partners.

She also championed new marketing and communications procedures.

Driving the “One BlackBerry” strategy to better support customers and partners, McMillan is working to integrate the BlackBerry and Cylance partner ecosystem as well as both of their programs globally.

B o l e s founded Blokworx in 2006 with a focus on security, reliability and positive user experience. In the past year, he has invested in next-level channel growth by hiring a vice president of sales and marketing and expanding product and SOC teams.

DeSantis built out a Microsoft Partnership Alliance recognizing BlueVoyant as a Gold Partner with a growing pipeline of over $1 million in annual contract value. He also launched three new whitelabel service provider partnerships.

Bardissi cultivated product development, continued to build out internal teams and grew the indirect channel strategy globally.

He worked closely with partners to help them get through the pandemic and maintain or grow their business.

bvoip

Canonical

Centilytics

Cisco Systems

VP, Business Development

VP, Global Alliances, Channels

Head of North American Channel

Check Point Software Technologies

Alec Stanners

As the pandemic hit, Stanners and CEO G e o r g e Bardissi launched the MSP Initiative. They took an education-first approach and delivered it virtually and then on the road through a “channel strong” tour.

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Chad Lindsey

Regis Paquette

Paquette restructured the channel team to maximize partner-led business versus fulfillment, investing in certifications for recurring VARs and offloading others to newly on-boarded distributors.

Don Burt

Burt revised the partner program to enable key strategic go-to-market attributes with best practices. He also made fundamentally sound margin methods available to partners.

Julia Chen

Frank Rauch

VP, Global Partner Transformation

R a u c h amplified the channel communication platform through regular virtual events with board members and executive staff.

He also led and designed the 2021 Partner Growth Program.

Chen has enabled partners to achieve higher wallet share through new buying centers, differentiated business outcome solutions on top of Cisco platforms, and ensuring customer success.

Worldwide Head of Channel Sales

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/11/21 4:07 PM

CHANNEL CHIEF

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Q. What’s in store for Eaton in 2021? What should partners be excited about?

A. We sell many solutions in the electrical sector and these all provide a lot of valuable data. With Brightlayer, our enterprise-wide digital transformation, we are bringing the digital future to light. This new future—the fusion of connected devices, data models, insights and analytics—helps more efficiently solve critical power management challenges. For our partners, this means leveraging our software and predictive analytics to bring offerings that can integrate into their managed services. Thus, allowing partners to deliver more value to their customers. It’s a great thing for everyone and we will support partners as they build their capabilities.

Q. After everything we’ve gone through in 2020, what’s changed being a channel chief?

A. I would say 2020 reinforced what I believe is the role of a channel chief. During the

first few months of COVID-19, I spent a lot of time listening and learning. It allowed me to prioritize our new challenges, better understand and articulate the needs of partners and customers. I wanted to focus on things that added value to our partners, their customers and Eaton, all while empowering my teams to do the same. It’s been challenging, but I’m encouraged by our people and our partners. It’s our responsibility to make sure our partners know we are there for them and we can move forward together. 2020 renewed my energy and commitment to the role.

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it’s a balance of listening, learning and implementing outcomes-based actions with our partners and our internal stakeholders. Our partners had different needs and wanted to leverage our capabilities in new ways to ensure they could continue adding value and remain profitable. My channel sales and marketing team focused on how they were engaging and communicating in the market with partners, as well. This helped gain perspective and a renewed appreciation of teamwork.

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develop their capabilities to the move to an as-a-service offering, to deliver a true power management solution. If 2020 showed me anything at all, it showed that we are committed to each other, we can face any challenge, we can find solutions and we can positively grow. That said, it’s going to be a successful 2021.

Learn more about Eaton’s award-winning program at www.poweradvantage.eaton.com

CRN_Eaton_Feb2021_CCV.indd 1

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

VP, Partner Performance, Operations, Global Partner Organization, Sales, Marketing

VP, Global Strategic Partner Organization

VP, Americas Partner Organization

VP, Global Distribution Sales

SVP, Customer Experience Solutions, Acceleration

José van Dijk

John Moses

Andrew Sage

Thimaya Subaiya

Va n D i j k launched the Partner Experience Platform as Cisco’s first digital platform for partner sales teams and partners. She also globally scaled Black Belt Academy digital training for partners and distributors.

H o l d e n drove multibillion-dollar channel and strategic partner go-to-market motions, solutions and new routes to market with partners. He also defined new criteria to measure strategic fit, execution and ROI.

Moses and his team have been leading through change, evolving Cisco’s go-to-market through investing in managed services and multi-architecture selling as well as the expansion of the route to market.

Sage leads Cisco’s $17 billion two-tier distribution channel. He drove business resiliency through Cisco’s distributors and their partners for the company’s smalland midsize-business customers.

Subaiya innovated to help partners grow their business with a simplified Cisco success portfolio partners can use to meet customer needs faster as well as digital journeys that scale adoption and renewals.

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Citrix Systems

Cloudera

VP, Partner Strategy, Programs

SVP, Global Partner Organization

VP, Partner Managed, As-A-Service Sales

SVP, Worldwide Channel Sales, Ecosystems

VP, Strategic Partnerships

Marc Surplus

Oliver Tuszik

Alexandra Zagury

Bronwyn Hastings

Gary Green

Cisco’s r a p i d C OVI D-19 pandemic response protected partners’ Cisco investments, practices and rewards. Surplus improved all major programs to drive market transitions and partner profitability.

T u s z i k s p e a r h e a d e d initiatives to improve partner profitability and ease of doing business with Cisco. He also orchestrated tighter Cisco regional alignment for greater consistency, scale and impact for partners.

Zagury is building the Partner Managed Services and As-a-Service sales organization. Her top initiative is developing what she calls “the factory”—an integrated execution model to align engineering, sales, operations and marketing.

Hastings expanded Citrix’s position in enabling the preferred way to work, designing Citrix into innovative offerings. She accelerated value for customers, creating secure and productive employee experiences.

Over the past year, Green took ch a r g e o f Cloudera’s strategic partnerships to further the Cloudera Connect program. He helped launch Cloudera Private Cloud and expanded the company’s partnership with IBM/Red Hat.

Cloudian

Clumio

Code42

Cohesity

Comcast Business

Director, Channel Marketing

Director, Channels

VP, Channel Sales

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

SVP, Channel Chief

Lori Wronsky

Bill Danz

Faraz Siraj

Michael Houghton

Craig Schlagbaum

Overcoming hurdles like a lack of in-person interaction, Wronsky was able to spearhead digital solutions to maintain relationships with channel partners and her team and keep pace with the previous year’s results.

Danz has matured Clumio’s channel goto-market strategy, including growing its authorized partner ecosystem, developing a user-friendly partner portal and launching the Clumio Technical Accreditation Program.

Code42 is transforming and building its security offerings around the channel. Siraj will be leading this transformation for Code42 and its partners as it moves toward being a 100 percent channel company in 2021.

Houghton developed a partner segmentation strategy ensuring partners receive the training, support, tools and resources to optimize their success. He also built out the distribution strategy to manage a large number of partners—close to 300.

Schlagbaum created a strategic plan to shift to an all-remote workforce while continuing to support partners and customers. He also increased teaming opportunities with the direct sales force, letting partners jointly close more business.

Commvault

Commvault

Commvault

ConnectWise

ConnectWise

VP, Partner Strategy, Programs

VP, Partner Strategy, Programs

VP, Global Channel, Alliances

Chief Customer Officer

SVP, Sales, Strategy

Jesse Grindeland

Grindeland is focused on helping Americas channel partners, including improving deal registration as well as support for a co-sell initiative. He also further established relationships with Microsoft, Pure, HPE, NetApp and Hitachi.

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Nick Holden

Lamia Megdiche

Megdiche relaunched the Partner Advant age Program, significantly improved partner incentives, and streamlined operations.

She has also worked with her team to align strategy and programs for all partner types and routes to market.

John Tavares

Ta v a r e s enhanced the Partner Advant age Program with a number of performance incentives. He also streamlined partner tier requirements for higher tier achievement and lucrative benefits and set strategic direction for partnerships.

Craig Fulton

A decade of helping MSPs transform their business has helped Fulton understand what they need from their business management software. Fulton leads ConnectWise’s IT Nation Explore, IT Nation Secure and IT Nation Connect events.

Gregg Lalle

In the continual pursuit to drive business e f f i c i e n c y, Lalle worked with the marketing team to develop a KPI calculator that assists IT solution providers in identifying what metrics to measure and how to accurately calculate efficiency.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/11/21 4:16 PM

CHANNEL CHIEF

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MDR Pioneer Steps Up Threat Detection eSentire Presents Big Plans For Partners

Q. What’s the story behind “managed detection and response” and how did eSentire coin this now-popular term?

A. Managed detection and response didn’t get a traditional naming ceremony; instead, the term was etched forever into the cybersecurity landscape when Gartner published its first annual Market Guide to Managed Detection and Response in May 2016. Functionally, eSentire managed detection and response existed well before 2016. We evolved our model beyond what other security service providers were doing.

Where MSSPs would wait for the customer to say, “I’d like you to look into ‘Alert X,’” we proactively performed investigations using high-fidelity data we had collected.

We acted on behalf of our clients to defend them against attacks as they unfolded.

Then we would send them a report that said, “Here’s what we did and here’s why we did it,” which we supported with the telemetry we had gathered and the analysis we had performed.

This new model proved popular and separated us from MSSPs. Eldon Sprickerhoff, eSentire’s founder, is proud that the company is known today as the creator and world leader of MDR and that it became the service of choice within the cybersecurity industry.

Q. With businesses forced to pivot due to the COVID-19 pandemic, how did eSentire management adjust and help customers thrive?

A. Management adjusted and we worked with our EDR vendors, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black, to put together service packages to help companies address short-term concerns until we had a better grasp on how long this pandemic and impact on businesses would last. We then worked with our marketing and sales teams to promote to our customers and prospects how esEndpoint and esLog provided the right telemetry to expand the MDR production that they were currently getting from esNetwork to the remote environment.

Q. What do you plan to bring to the partner program in 2021 and how are you increasing your partner base?

A. Late last year, we launched an enhanced Medallion Partner Program with a robust

MDF component. We also have a series of services and capabilities on our product roadmap coming out shortly that target specific technology partner ecosystems, IT infrastructures and business models like hosting and retail datacenters. Additionally, we’re partnering with CRN as an integral part of our core partner recruitment cadences in our partner recruitment campaign to aid in the expansion of our partner base, particularly in the west.

Chris Braden

”

Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances

Our ultimate goal is to enable companies of all sizes to realize the benefits of full-spectrum zero trust MDR available through our partner ecosystem. Equally, we want to work with our partners to position them to be able to deliver enhanced offerings that improve and increase the value of eSentire as delivered to our customers.

”

For more information, visit us at www.esentire.com.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS ConnectWise

ConnectWise

ConnectWise

CoreDial

Corelight

VP, Cybersecurity Initiatives

VP, Consulting Services

COO

Chief Revenue Officer

Head of Global Channels, Alliances

Jay Ryerse

Geoffrey Willison

Ken Lienemann

Scott Hoard

Ryerse led the team that created the M S P+ Cybersecurity Framework and 400 pages of content dedicated to securing the channel community and its customers. He delivered Certify Fundamentals cybersecurity training to 6,000 students from MSPs.

S c h o w helped ConnectWise partners outperform the industry average in maintaining EBITDA despite a downturn in revenue due to COVID-19. He maintained engagement while going virtual and delivered crucial guidance on business management.

Willison ovesaw the integration of Continuum into ConnectWise to create a company focused on the success of partners. He created channel-focused initiatives, including Voice of the Partner (partner feedback), and a new Partner Communications team.

Lienemann has spoken with each of CoreDial’s top-growing partners and connected overall with more than half of the partner community.

Each provides invaluable insight about the market, product adoption and competition.

H o a r d enhanced strategic alliances, specifically in the MSSP space. He also expanded Corelight’s channel footprint in North America and has enabled over 200 channel systems engineers globally.

Couchbase

Coupa

Cradlepoint

Critical Start

SVP, Business Development, Strategy

VP, Alliances Programs

Cox Communications John Muscarella

SVP, Partner Sales, Alliances

VP, Channel, Alliances

Matt McDonough

Sally Stephens

Sr. Director, Indirect Sales Channels

Eric Purcell

Dwayne Myers

McDonough led Couchbase Cloud’s AWS launch and general availability on AWS Marketplace; the Couchbase Server general availability on Red Hat Marketplace; and the “Infosys Health Insights Platform” partnership.

Stephens focused on channel strategy and execution, including establishing strong relationships with partners. To accomplish all she set out to do in 2020, she hired a team to drive business development and partner marketing.

Muscarella developed the concept and executed on a blog series focused on “Marketing Tactics In The Small Business World” and “Tips for Partners To Accelerate Their Small Business In Turbulent Times.”

Purcell aligned the global team and partner ecosystem for expansion in APAC, Canada, EMEA, Mexico and the U.S. He also led new program investments, including the acquisition of marketing platform Impartner.

Myers built a ch a n n e l program from scratch with partner agreements and rules of engagement. The company has signed over 50 partners and added channel marketing and operations and distribution management.

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike

Cybera

CyberArk

Director, Partner Sales, Public Sector, Health Care

VP, Worldwide Alliances, Channels, Business Development

VP, Americas Strategic Partners, Alliances

EVP, Marketing

VP, Global Channels

Matthew Kelly

Matthew Polly

Michael Rogers

Bethany Allee

Chris Moore

Kelly oversees a complete public sector team for CrowdStrike. Under his direction, CrowdStrike passed a major milestone for partner-sourced business in 2020 as an alliances team.

Polly led the organization on a multidimensional growth plan to expand how CrowdStrike engages across channel partners, MSSPs, global systems integrators, technology alliances and cloud providers.

With Rogers leading the charge, CrowdStrike continued to increase the investments in its partner ecosystem, resources, support infrastructure, marketing and new routes to market.

Allee oversaw the marketing strategy to grow Cybera’s channel program from 36 partners to an ecosystem with more than 336 partners in 12 months. She also redesigned and launched a new partner portal.

Moore reorganized the partner strategy to include invested regional VARs and global systems integrators. He also built the foundation for a new MSP program, and the MSP business is now up 100 percent year over year.

CyberGRX

Cytracom

Cyxtera

D&H Distributing

D&H Distributing

Global Director, Channel, Alliances

VP, Channel

VP, Global Channel Strategies, Sales

SVP, Vendor Management

VP, Cloud, Services Business Unit

Walter Specht

In the past year, Specht helped open up two new markets for the channel—Australia and Western Europe. Through new partner recruitment and adding new partner managers, CyberGRX is seeing new revenue coming from other territories.

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Brad Schow

Dave Goldie

G o l d i e d e v e l oped and executed a strategy to scale Cytracom’s people, products and processes to better enable partners to offer cloud-based communications that increases both new and existing revenue and reduces churn.

Nicholas Voth

Voth led the rebuild and launch of Cyxtera’s updated Channel Partner Program, increasing opportunities for its global ecosystem of partners and resellers, as well as the launch of Cyxtera’s updated Reseller Partner Program.

Tim Billing

During the pandemic, D&H’s focus was on partners’ and vendors’ needs. Communication was critical, so Billing and his team hosted over 150 vendor executive “connections” to share macro and micro channel insight and collaboratively develop action plans.

Jason Bystrak

Bystrak implemented the “Monetize the Seat” initiative, helping channel partners deliver total XaaS solutions while improving profitability.

Resources include a broad portfolio of devices, SaaS and services, the Cloud Marketplace and more.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/11/21 4:19 PM

CHANNEL CHIEF

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ADT Cybersecurity Boosts Partner IQ Channel-First Partner Program Has Big 2021 Plans

Q. What does it mean for you to receive the 2021 CRN Most Influential Channel Chiefs honor and how do you feel it recognizes ADT Cybersecurity’s Partner Program achievements?

MOST INFLUENTIAL

A. It’s a tremendous honor that I’m proud and humbled to receive. I have had the

privilege of working with some of the best channel leaders and it’s now exciting to implement my learnings and lead a channel powerhouse at ADT. This recognition is strong validation of the partner program we have built, the differentiated value we deliver to our partner base and the world-class team we have assembled at ADT Cybersecurity.

Q. Where does ADT Cybersecurity stand in the channel marketplace currently, especially amid the growing cyberthreats for partners and customers?

A. An important focus for 2021 is to continue building awareness of ADT in the

cybersecurity channel and how we enable partners to differentiate and grow quickly and profitably. Specifically, ADT-IQ, which is a SIEM/MDR-as-a-Service, has proven to be a “weapon of mass competitive differentiation” for our partners. Traditionally, platforms like SIEM/MDR have been reserved for the large enterprise as they’re costly and complex to implement and manage. ADT-IQ has solved for this with an incredibly affordable solution that not only makes advanced threat intelligence available to channel partners servicing small business and mid-market clients, but we also take care of the 24/7/365 monitoring and management. The threat landscape has expanded exponentially over the past year. ADT-IQ enables partners to protect their clients by monitoring all North-South and East-West network traffic to identify zero-day threats and anomalies, without having to make an investment in time or personnel. Quite simply, ADT-IQ is the right technology at the right time.

Jon Kabrud

”

MSP Channel Leader

This recognition is strong validation of the partner program we have built, the differentiated value we deliver to our partner base and the worldclass team we have assembled at ADT Cybersecurity.

Q. What’s in the ADT Cybersecurity Partner Program pipeline for 2021?

A. The first half of the year will be continued focus on operational efficiencies and

our journey of becoming a world-class channel organization. Since our September 2020 relaunch, we have introduced and implemented numerous tools, processes and standards. Q1 and Q2 will be all about execution. 2021 will be an incredibly exciting time for ADT Cybersecurity partners. We will not only continue our charter as a “channel first” company, but we will also be doubling down on our partner base. I will be staffing up field sales and technical resources, evolving our MDF program and investing in lead generation and partner growth opportunities. We will also be launching several new managed security services that will offer our partners the opportunity to grow their recurring monthly revenues quickly and profitably.

”

Become an ADT Cybersecurity Partner Today. https://www.adt.com/cyber/partners

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS D&H Distributing

D&H Distributing

Dark Cubed

Datto

Datto

VP, VAR Sales

VP, Marketing

Founder, CEO

Sr. Channel Development Manager

SVP, Business Development

Peter DiMarco

Jenn Walcott

Vince Crisler

Rob Rae

DiMarco leads the Emerging VAR team, which has delivered its highest active customer counts in years supporting thous ands of partners through the pandemic. Key growth areas include cloud, client devices, collaboration, security and UC.

Wa l c o t t ’ s team was key to D&H’s success and that of its SMB partners, retail/ consumers and etailers in the first half of the fiscal year. Her team built partner resources and programs to help them sustain and grow business throughout the pandemic.

During the past 12 months, and despite the pandemic, Crisler accelerated Dark Cubed’s commitment to the M S P channel, significantly increasing its financial commitment—and investor commitment—to channel development and sales.

DePalma led an MDF program that has consistently produced 500 percent in ROI. He has also been awarded multiple best keynote awards at various events and has run the sales/marketing track at DattoCon since 2017.

Rae and his team work extensively with all solution providers. Moving from physical to virtual events in 2020, they were instrumental in coordinating partner engagement through hundreds of partner events.

Datto

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies

Director, Channel Development

SVP, North American Channel Sales

SVP, Global Partner Marketing

Global Channel Chief

VP, Federal Channel, Alliances

Eric Torres

Gregg Ambulos

Cheryl Cook

Rola Dagher

Kelli Furrer

Torres’ focus is on growing Datto’s new partner base and existing partner sales. He and his team launched industry events to gain new leads and partner events to increase Datto revenue through additional partner sales of Datto.

Dell continued its go-to-market transformation journey, not just in the channel but across the entire sales organization. Ambulos invested in initiatives and programs to make it easier and more profitable for partners to lead with Dell.

Cook spearh e a d e d stimulus/ relief so partners could maximize benefits via digital channels. She also pivoted the organization to curate, create and drive digital enablement partner resources in the market.

Dagher’s philosophy is “learn it, earn it, return it,” and one of her key focuses is to return her experience to the partner community. She is now building a program that will help partners execute today while elevating their businesses for tomorrow.

Through Furrer’s leadership, D e l l ’ s f e d e r a l partner ecosystem was able to better align its focus on simplifying processes and programs, increase partner win rates and grow incentive programs.

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies

Digital Defense

Digital Guardian

SVP, Global Services Sales, Channel, Alliances, OEM Solutions

SVP, Global Alliances

SVP, Global Channel, Alliances, OEM Specialty Sales

Chief Revenue Officer

VP, North American Sales, Channel

Erica Lambert

Denise Millard

Scott Millard

Bob Layton

Troy Gabel

Last year Lambert provided services to partners that were crucial to keeping their customers’ businesses running, arming them with flexible delivery models, remote services, more training and increased automation.

M i l l a r d launched a campaign to connect Global Alliances’ sellers to partners, ensuring close collaboration and deep partnerships.

Internally, this included driving increased accountability and clearer roles and responsibilities.

M i l l a r d continued Dell’s goto-market transformation to better serve partners. He brought the data center partner team into one team supporting partners across solution providers, distribution, OEM and global alliances.

Layton came to Digital Defense at the beginning of 2020 to create a strategy for growth. The global service provider program is growing and the MSP program already has partners in the U.S., U.K. and Latin America.

With Gabel leading the charge, D i g i t a l Guardian has expanded its channel program—70 percent of business is now driven through the channel. It was 50 percent in 2019, and the 2021 target is 90 percent via the channel.

Druva

Dynabook Americas

Dynatrace

Eaton

Eaton

Wendy Sue Linsky

VP, Worldwide Partners

Sales VP, Midmarket. U.S. Channels, Data Center

VP, GM

Linsky continued to build the Preferred Partner Program and created specialized education-focused SKUs to address Chromebook shortages. Dynabook also has collaborated with Intel and Microsoft, gaining unique insight.

Allen led the launch of the Cloud Partner Competency Program, which helps organizations identify partners with a proven track record of using Dynatrace to accelerate their customers’ digital transformation.

Timm Hoyt

Global VP, Partners

Michael Allen

Sr. Director, U.S. Channel Sales

Hoyt spearheaded the move to implement distribution into the route-to-market motion. This included Druva becoming one of AWS Marketplace’s Top 10 ISV partners, as well as launching a partnership with Tech Data.

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Michael DePalma

Curtiz Gangi

Gangi’s focus in 2020 was on learning from partners, prioritizing their challenges and adding value. He created new mess aging, programs and pilots and updated sales processes to build new pipeline.

Hervé Tardy

Tardy was key to launching an edge computing program, which came after an evaluation of customer pain points.

The program is articulated around three key words— “Forget, Automate, Secure” —and helped partners win new business at the edge.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/12/21 12:56 PM

CHANNEL CHIEF

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Cradlepoint Still Puts Partners First Following Acquisition

Learn How Leading 5G Vendor Transforms Business Q. How does the Ericsson acquisition impact your job as channel chief and how does it impact Cradlepoint partners?

A. It’s the best of both worlds. For the Cradlepoint team, we remain a standalone organization. Our channel-centric sales motion and our humble and hungry approach to supporting partners doesn’t change. From a technical alignment perspective, the company synergies are powerful. Our partners will notice an impact in 5G collaboration and innovation. From the carrier core to the enterprise edge, this unlocks the full potential and benefit of what people had been speaking about with Wireless WAN. Q. How does the acquisition position Cradlepoint to better compete against vendors like Cisco Meraki?

A. Cradlepoint has been a leader in LTE solutions to enterprise and public sector

organizations for over a decade. Our heritage is wireless and LTE. But now, as part of Ericsson, we have access to the advanced network functionality that only LTE and 5G core networks provide. These deliver end-to-end network capabilities securely with quality of experience that customers will require to realize the full power of 5G and the Wireless WAN. It helps us compete and win against what I’d call wireline-centric vendors like Cisco and others.

Q. How has Cradlepoint progressed in the past year amid the uncertainty in the market?

A. I’ll stress in terms of our humble nature and how we go about it: despite some of

the macro headwinds, we had another record year. We experienced rapid adoption of the Wireless WAN use cases. The unfortunate pandemic accelerated use cases from health care to providing connectivity for a host of industries. The common theme was that customers and partners realized the power and flexibility of Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Service and our purpose-built endpoints and how it provides a single platform that connects people, places and things.

Q. What’s Cradlepoint’s channel strategy for 2021 and how will it affect your partner base?

A. We’re focused on building a vibrant ecosystem that expands our reach, our growth

and exceeds customer and partner expectations. In 2021, we’ll invest to ensure Cradlepoint and our partners lead LTE and 5G for the Wireless WAN era. These investments highlight three areas: people, programs and platform. We hire people who are masters at their craft. We’re also building the industry’s first 5G for Enterprise Branch specialization program and are committed to delivering the most relevant, impactful enablement and programs to ensure our partners build a profitable and sustainable practice with Cradlepoint. We continue to evolve our NetCloud Service to our soonto-be 12-month lead in 5G for business. We will also launch a transformational partner relationship platform in 2021 that I’ll announce later this year.

Eric Purcell

”

Senior Vice President, Global Partner Sales and Technology Alliances, Cradlepoint

We’re committed to leading the way and helping partners build a Wireless WAN practice so customers move beyond the branch and beyond wires. We are aggressively delivering our Elastic Edge vision which securely connects any office, location, facility, vehicle and anything the enterprise wants to connect.

”

To learn more about the Cradlepoint Partner Program, visit https://cradlepoint.com/partners-CRN

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2/9/21 8:48 AM

2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Edify Labs

Epson America

Equinix

Ericom

erwin

VP, Channel Sales, Alliances

VP, North American Commercial Sales, Channel

VP, Global Partnerships, Alliances

Director, Channels, U.S., Latin America, Canada

Chief Revenue Officer

J.P. Dundas

Greg Adgate

Michael Santacross

Dave Casillo

Dundas is adept at understanding master agents’ unique ecosystem. This has helped Edify secure six master agents in 2020.

Having partners validate Edify’s innovative platform has helped gain fans across the globe.

Versfelt reached out to key partners after the initial impact of COVID-19 and focused on the health of their employees and business.

Epson offered assistance with credit, terms and supply so partners could address the new economy.

A d g a t e helped lead key investments to scale the channel and drive an improved partner digital experience, including a partner quote tool, partner portal enhancements and the use of analytics to drive partner alignment.

E r i c o m was Santacross’ first opportunity to develop a channel program from the ground up. He led the effort, getting input and gaining buy-in and leveraging his past experience to create a fair approach for all Ericom resellers.

C a s i l l o executed the next evolution of erwin’s strategic plan for the channel.

He augmented leadership roles within the solution provider and global alliances organization and drove engagement in the consulting and systems integrator space.

eSentire

Evolve IP

Exabeam

Exclusive Networks

Expedient

VP, Global Channels, Alliances

SVP, Channel Services

VP, Channels

VP, North American Sales

VP, Strategic Initiatives, Partner Channel Alliances

Chris Braden

Gary Coben

Ted Plumis

Christina Banker

John McKenna

B r a d e n launched a Partner Advisory Board composed of some of eSentire’s most strategic and successful partners. The board enables eSentire to gain valuable feedback and insight from partners about an array of issues.

Coben led the channel migration from UCaaS to collaboration via native integration to Microsoft Teams. As one of the first U.S. VoIP companies ahead of this opportunity, it was already established as a leading direct routing provider when COVID-19 hit.

P l u m i s launched the Exabeam Cloud Platform, which will let partners build applications on the platform using Exabeam’s SDK or simply sell them through the marketplace.

He also launched the first annual “Partner of the Year” awards.

B a n k e r designed a new s ales structure to better serve partners. This reorganization has realigned roles by region and strength.

Every partner now has a dedicated team ensuring its preferred communication method can be accommodated.

McKenna created the Premier Partner level and on-boarded two new partners. He worked closely with the partners’ executives to align a joint go-tomarket strategy to help their customers achieve their multi-cloud initiatives.

ExtraHop

ExtraHop

Extreme Networks

F5

FiberLight

Director, Channels, Americas

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

Chief Revenue Officer

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

VP, Strategic Partners, Alliances

Todd DeBell

Mark Fitzmaurice

Joe Vitalone

Lisa Citron

Jes Shiflet

D e B e l l introduced new partner financing options that helped close more deals and shortened the sales cycle by 20 percent. He also launched partner sales incentives that resulted in over 100 net-new proofs of concept from partners.

Fitzmaurice expanded ExtraHop’s program to include lucrative incentives for partners and develop new MSP, global systems integrator and alliances partnerships.

He also worked with legal to streamline global partner agreements via DocuSign.

Vitalone is focused on restruct u r i n g Extreme’s partner program around the as-a-service model.

The move to Network as a Service has grown rapidly, and he has led several initiatives for developing MSPs.

C i t r o n helped the channel organization and partners find new ways of working and new routes to market.

She has piloted programs that have provided a foundation for how to continue to improve the partner experience.

S h i f l e t focused on automating and enabling the partner community and emphasized supporting partners that deliver high-capacity lit and dark fiber solutions.

The team increased partner sales revenue by 200 percent through October 2020.

FireEye

FireEye

FireMon

Five9

Fluree

VP, Americas Channels

Sr. Director, National Channel

VP, Global Channel Sales

VP, Global Channel Sales

VP, Global Partners

Chris Carter

C a r t e r h e l p e d d e l i v e r subscription-based, channel-optimized consumption, including FireEye Endpoint Security, FireEye Network Security, FireEye Email Security and Mandiant Security Validation.

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Tom Versfelt

Kristi Houssiere

Houssiere created repeat able revenue paths for Affinity Partners to spotlight their cybersecurity services expertise. She also helped orchestrate delivery of cloud security products through Cloud Ready partners in the Cloud Marketplace.

Andrew Warren

Wa r r e n was a key player in developing a channelwide assessment and enablement program.

FireMon’s 45-day security policy assessment program enhances partnership alignment and provides additional revenue opportunities for partners.

Jake Butterbaugh

Butterbaugh launched the Five9 Global Channel Partner Program, including a more focused approach to empowering partners at all levels. This allowed Five9 to retain and attract more partners and grow the channel partner business substantially.

Buck Flannigan

Flannigan is adept at navigating complex strategic partnerships and leads the global partner community, which delivers products and services built upon a data-centric architecture powered by Fluree’s open, semantic web standards.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/11/21 8:21 PM

CHANNEL CHIEF

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VIEW

Partnership is the Fastest Way to Grow As a channel partner—YOU—have never been more important to the success of businesses worldwide. As you think forward in 2021, remember this: Technology is not the answer, it’s merely the enabler. Your people, your partnerships and your customers are, and always will be, the difference.

Now is the time to engage Ingram Micro, partner smart, and scale your success. From the simple to the complex, our channel chiefs and the teams they lead are eager to learn more about your business, listen to your needs and find more ways to grow together!

Q. What’s key to channel partners’ success in 2021?

“Changing the engagement with customers is key in 2021. To succeed at scale, channel partners must focus on the end-user mission and link their IT solutions to their mission outcomes.”

Tony Celeste, Executive Director and GM, Public Sector

“Remember, the experience is everything and you get out of it what you put in. A happy and grounded team will lead to happy and grateful customers.”

Tyler Coughlan, VP, Customer Experience

“Take the time to plan, continue to lean on each other and stay close to your business partners, including Ingram Micro, and even closer to your customers.”

ecosystem, especially Ingram Micro, to find ways to optimize and grow their business.”

“The partners who are truly finding success with Ingram Micro IoT are the ones who are leveraging the many services and offerings we have to help supplement or offset any gaps they may have.”

Susan O’Sullivan, VP, Sales

“The rapid growth around digital transformation, coupled with the scarcity of resources to address assessment, migration and management need, provides a wealth of services-rich opportunities for partners.”

Eric Hembree, Director, IoT

“Look for the vendors who are leaning into the channel and really want to drive netnew business to you and increase your share of wallet with existing customers.”

Tim FitzGerald, VP, Cloud Channel Sales Americas

“Being able to lean on their vendors and distribution partners to embrace change will continue to be a competitive advantage for channel partners.”

Eric Kohl, VP, Security and Data Center

“Channel partners need to invest in the training, technology and talent required to sell in today’s environment and lean into their

Jeff Yelton, VP, Infrastructure and Specialty Technologies

Darren Gottsemann, Executive Director, SMB

Tony Celeste

Tyler Coughlan

Tim FitzGerald

Darren Gottsemann

Executive Director and GM, Public Sector

VP, Customer Experience

VP, Cloud Channel Sales Americas

Executive Director, SMB

Eric Hembree

Eric Kohl

Susan O’Sullivan

Jeff Yelton

VP, Sales

VP, Infrastructure and Specialty Technologies

Director, IoT

VP, Security and Data Center

Listen to INGRAM MICRO’s B2B Tech Talk Podcast on Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/IMTechTalk

CRN_Ingram_Feb2021_CCVl.indd 1

2/9/21 8:50 AM

2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Fortinet

Fortinet

Fortinet

Fortinet

Fuze

VP, Channel Sales

Director, National Accounts

Sr. Director, Channel Sales Operations

Sr. Director, Distribution Sales

VP, Global Channels, Alliances

Jon Bove

Landon Scott

Curt Stratton

Timothy Puccio

Led by Bove, t h e ch a n nel team launched the Engage Partner Program, resetting how partners can engage and choose the business model that best fits their organization. It also allows them to choose which specialization aligns with their go-to-market.

Labelle leads the team covering C DW and has won the “Gold Partner of the Year” award from the company. In addition, the team was awarded the “Security Partner of the Year” by Softchoice.

Scott was key to the E n g a g e Partner Program, which accounts for new consumption models and supports partners’ shift to servicesled models. He also helped support partners through the pandemic with flexibility on requirements.

Stratton drives the o v e r a l l distribution v i s i o n , strategy and execution of partner recruitment, enablement and business development efforts through Fortinet’s network of distributors in North America.

Puccio leads t h e ch a n nel sales strategy and evolution of Fuze’s go-to-market model with partners—including referral agents, resellers and alliances—and is driving broader adoption of its platform across the globe.

Getac

Gigamon

GitLab

Google Cloud

Google Cloud

Director, Channel Sales, North America

VP, Worldwide Channels, Alliances

VP, Worldwide Channels

Global Channel Chief, VP, Global SMB Sales

Global Chief, Partner Program, Strategy

Keri Bolding

Larissa Crandall

Michelle Hodges

Carolee Gearhart

Nina Parker Harding

Bolding launched Getac’s first partner program in January 2020. She has developed a more loyal partner community and is providing more value to Getac’s partners in North America.

Crandall played a key role in launching the Gigamon Playbook for the channel, building creative demand generation, training and enablement and providing financing for partners amid the pandemic.

Within the past year, and since Hodges joined GitLab, the channel team has released a new valuebased partner program, launched a new portal and deal registration functionality, and added 200-plus DevOps services partners.

Gearhart w o r k e d with partners to help customers quickly adapt and transform during changing conditions. She transitioned partner marketing plans and infrastructure to all-digital, including a fully virtual Next conference.

Harding’s mission is to drive overall strategy around how Google Cloud attracts and grows a compelling and profitable ecosystem that delivers the highest customer impact. She also launched the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program.

Google Cloud

Guardicore

HashiCorp

North America Regional Partner Leader

Head of Channels

Global Channel Chief

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

VP, Worldwide Partner Programs, Operations

Worldwide Head of Partner Sales

Eric Rosenkranz

John Ryan

Michelle Graff

Jesse Chavez

George Hope

One of Rosenkranz’s key intentions in fiscal year 2020 was increasing the percentage of reselling across the corporate (midmarket) segment. In partnership with sales leaders and top MSPs, Google Cloud saw a 7X increase in nine months.

Ryan s aid the performance of his team during extraordinary times was nothing short of amazing. Their combined efforts helped to solidify the best year that Guardicore has had in its history, increasing year-over-year channel revenue by over 300 percent.

U n d e r G r a f f ’ s leadership, HashiCorp has built a partner ecosystem that focuses on rewards for partner specializations and capabilities rather than volume attainment while also building a model to maximize sales productivity.

C h a v e z enhanced the HPE partner experience with no-touch/low-touch pricing and launched Genie, an AIpowered robot that brings average deal registration estimated time of arrival to one day.

Wi t h o v e r 20 years of technology experience, Hope is now responsible for driving the growth of HPE’s $20 billion partner business as it accelerates its edge-to-cloud Platform-asa-Service strategy.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hitachi Vantara

HP Inc.

HP Inc.

HYCU

Leslie Maher

VP, Strategic Partners, Alliances

Head of Global Routes To Market

VP, GM, Americas Commercial Channel Sales

Sr. Director, Sales, Americas

In response to the pand e m i c , M a h e r h o s t e d roundtables with partners to ensure HPE stayed connected with them during the critical early months of uncertainty. Her message was, “We are here to help.”

King prioritized being flexible in partner engagements and made it easier for partners to do business with the company. Her team has delivered investment funds and incentives and accelerated deal pricing guidance.

VP, North America Partners, Inside Sales, SMB

36

Greg Labelle

Kimberly King

Luciana Broggi

Broggi managed H P’s C OVI D-19 response when it came to channel partners and led the launch of HP Amplify, a new partner program designed to simplify and harmonize the partner experience.

Scott Lannum

Despite challenges the industry faced with COVID-19, HP gained share—which Lannum said is a testament to the team’s collaboration with partners. HP is now developing offerings that flex with customers’ evolving needs.

Mike Taylor

Taylor has worked with the Nutanix reseller community to further interest in Nutanix Mine with HYCU. He has also worked to move forward cloud-native service offerings for Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure Cloud.

FEBRUARY 2021

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How To

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by Seeing the Whole Story

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Q. Why should you partner with EDB over a competitor?

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Mike Coffield

Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances, EDB

”

EDB recognizes that our partners are a critical source of our tremendous growth and position as a leader in the PostgreSQL space.

With PostgreSQL popularity continuing to rise worldwide, we are deeply committed to helping our partners increase revenue by providing their customers and prospects with in-demand products, services and support needed to boost innovation and accelerate business.

”

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Learn more about why organizations are moving toward open-source technologies and how EDB can help you win: https://www.enterprisedb.com/partners

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS IBM

IBM

IFS

IGEL

iland

GM, IBM Partner Ecosystem

SVP, Worldwide Ecosystems, Blockchain

Global Head of Partner, Channels

Global Channel Chief

VP, Global Channels

David La Rose

Merlin Knott

Balaji Subramanian

Koorosh Khashayar

L a R o s e modernized the Partn e r Wo r l d program and created new build/services tracks that are aligned to IBM’s open hybrid multicloud platform strategy. He also relaunched the Global Advisory Board.

Lord guided the team and built relationships as IBM has expanded its ecosystem.

IBM’s open hybrid cloud platform, based on Red Hat OpenShift, serves as a catalyst for change among customers.

Knott added a Partner Relationship Management system that gives clear visibility into partner pipeline and enables communication between IFS and the partner throughout the sales cycle. He also increased training and certification.

Subramanian developed a channel program that moves partners from a transactional relationship with IGEL to a more predictable and richer model that focuses on customer segments, verticals, new logos and customer success.

Khashayar on-boarded two new m a s t e r agents, Telarus and MicroCorp. He also drove partner engagement during the pandemic, working one on one with partners via web conferencing and virtual events.

Impartner

Imperva

Imperva

Infoblox

SVP Alliances, Strategic Relationships

Sr. Director, Global Channel Marketing, Programs

VP, Global Channels

InfinityQS International

Mark Rogers

Kirt Jorgenson

Jim Ritchings

Lori Cornmesser

Jason Chester

VP, Worldwide Partner, Alliance Sales

Director, Global Channel Programs

Rogers led the initiative to compile Impartner’s products into a package called Channel Ignite, which can be completely sold, implemented and managed by partners from start to finish. Many partners are now selling these packages.

Jorgenson launched virtual partner executive engagement programs, expanded the team to develop new services programs for partners, and enhanced incentive programs to drive partner engagement and pipeline.

Ritchings led Imperva’s transformation into a true “channel-first” company and added several key programs around services, incentives and enablement. Imperva has made the shift required to gain partners’ trust.

Chester refocused partners’ go-to-market strategy during COVID-19, leveraging the company’s software as a solution to many pandemic-related operational challenges. This led to a surge in new partnerships.

Cornmesser built a highperforming channel team that delivered improved performance.

She also developed strategic pillars to capture new markets and partner types, resulting in recordbreaking results in security and SaaS.

Infocyte

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro

VP, Sales

Executive Director, GM, Public Sector

VP, Customer Experience

VP, Cloud Channel Sales, Americas

Executive Director, SMB Sales, Midmarket

Chris Auger

Tony Celeste

Tyler Coughlan

Tim FitzGerald

Darren Gottesmann

A u g e r helped partners through the challenges the pandemic presented. He has focused on developing relationships to ensure Infocyte is tailoring offerings, support and overall initiatives to help each partner.

In preparation for 2020, Celeste had worked with the leadership team on a multiyear strategic growth plan for public sector that prioritized value creation Having this plan was key when the pandemic hit.

Coughlan is leading the Customer Experience initiative, making improvements across all touch points with resellers, manufacturers and employees. He is leveraging technology to drive better internal and external experiences.

Remaining connected to his team and partners last year was what FitzGerald counts as his key accomplishment.

Leveraging technologies that allowed for “connectedness” was challenging but provided a way to get to know people better.

Gottesmann was able to advance the careers of many leaders within the SMB team, locally and globally.

These well-deserved promotions worked to keep morale high and deliver an exceptional experience to partners and providers.

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro

Ingram Micro

Intel

Director, IoT

VP, Security, Data Center

VP, U.S. Sales

VP, U.S. Infrastructure, Specialty Technologies

Director, Distribution

Eric Hembree

Hembree leads the U.S. go-tomarket team, engaging with IoT-focused vendors and partners who want to grow their IoT business.

Overnight, he and his team brought to market new brands and technologies in response to the pandemic.

38

Bob Lord

Eric Kohl

Kohl took on responsibility for the IBM Business Unit, Dat a Center Software and the Emerging Business Group, which is focused on investing in new manufacturer relationships and driving channel sales for emerging vendors and technologies.

Susan O’Sullivan

In 2020, the safety and health of employees a n d ch a n nel partners was priority one for O’Sullivan. She and her team reached out weekly to make sure people were able to work physically but also psychologically.

Jeff Yelton

Y e l t o n oversees the Cisco, H PE, and Integrated Solutions and Specialty Technologies business units. He is responsible for growing the U.S. cloud IaaS business.

David Allen

One of Allen’s most impactful accomplishments of the past year was Intel delivering significantly more CPUs into the channel, allowing partners to meet the huge surge in demand arising from remote learn/ remote work initiatives.

FEBRUARY 2021

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CHANNEL CHIEF

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APC By Schneider Electric Makes 2021 Year Of The Partner MSP Community Set To Benefit From Partner Incentives

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Q. What did APC by Schneider Electric learn from 2020 and how will you apply it to 2021?

A. We learned the power of simplification. It was imperative that we had simple,

consistent communication and simpler programs for partners to leverage. In July, we relaunched our opportunity registration program as ORP Simplified, removing complexities and increasing discounts at the most critical time. This kickstarted our partner program revolution, focusing on go-to-market strategies and ensuring overarching channel partner program development that fits varying business models.

Q. Why do you refer to 2021 as the Year of the Partner?

A. We have an action-packed year of new programs for the growing MSP community, improved incentives for partners in all program levels and new ways of enabling partners that they haven’t seen from a power vendor before. We also have a host of new offers that will increase market competitiveness for our partners.

Q. You’ve talked about the importance of the digital touch. How will APC by Schneider Electric focus on digital components to help improve partner business in 2021?

A. We understand the importance of embracing digital in all business aspects. Last

year, my team quickly pivoted to provide live digital trainings and came up with creative and heartfelt ways to interact with partners, including our Peloton contest and raising money for charity through business. We acknowledge that digital engagements from sales to marketing to ecommerce are cornerstones of the partnerships we have.

We’re investing in platforms and people to support a more digital marketplace. This ranges from ecommerce to digital marketing to drive demand generation.

Q. What is the APC by Schneider Electric digital journey and how do partners benefit?

A. We have lived the digital journey alongside our partners the past few years,

listening to their challenges, plans and investing and developing software and digital services that allow partners the agility needed to best serve customers. We’re thrilled to be launching a new partner program that provides the tools and incentives to launch this part of their business and help offset costs during this growth phase.

Shannon Sbar

Vice President of Channels, APC by Schneider Electric

”

How we do business is rapidly evolving and budgets are at a premium right now.

I am working hard with my team to create innovative offers to support our partners and their customers in a new way as well as expanding our partner programs to support new business models, such as managed service providers.

”

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CRN_APC_Feb2021_CCVl.indd 1

2/12/21 8:00 AM

Cast your votes at

CRN.COM MADNESS

Shannon Sbar APC by Schneider Electric Chris Lamborn NetApp

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It starts with 32 of the indu prominent channel chiefs. one. CRN’s seventh annu Madness Tournament of some of the channel’s mos executives against each ot to-head battles where C vote to determine the victo votes at CRN.com/madne March 18.

George Hope Hewlett Packard Enterprise Curtiz Gangi Eaton Steve Biondi Lenovo

Kimberly King Hitachi Vantara Rob Cato Lenovo Donna Grothjan Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise

company

Andy Zollo StorageCraft Technologies

CHAMPIO

Jason Kimrey Intel Rola Dagher Dell Technologies Scott Lannum HP Inc. Scott Mann Scale Computing

Hardware

CRN_Feb2021_ChannelMadness.indd 40

2/11/21 8:46 PM

VOTING OPENS MARCH 18

Bob Lord IBM Gavriella Schuster Microsoft

22 00 1261

Doug Yeum Amazon Web Services

YOUR CHIEF

Eric Martorano Nextiva Carolee Gearhart Google Cloud

h 32 of the industry’s most channel chiefs. It ends with seventh annual Channel ournament of Chiefs pits e channel’s most influential against each other in headttles where CRN readers rmine the victors. Cast your RN.com/madness starting

Jonathan McCormick Intermedia Kevin Rooney Veeam Software Sandy Hogan VMware

Kendra Krause Sophos Todd Meister Zscaler Steve Pataky Area 1 Security Michelle Welch WatchGuard Technologies Frank Rauch Check Point Software Technologies

HAMPION

Matthew Polly CrowdStrike Karl Soderlund Palo Alto Networks Joe Sykora Proofpoint

SECURITY

Share your bracket: #CRNChannelMadness

CRN_Feb2021_ChannelMadness.indd 41

2/11/21 8:47 PM

2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Intel

Intel

Intel

IntelePeer

Director, Partner Sales Programs

GM, U.S. Channel, Partner Programs

U.S. Director, National Solution Providers

Chief Commercial Officer

Todd Garrigues

Jason Kimrey

Jared Quoyeser

Intelex Technologies Kristen Duda

VP, Strategic Alliances

One of Garrigues’ focus areas was driving increased transparency with partners through video, webinar and virtual event engagements that keyed in on critical, timely topics, including supply and COVID-19related support.

K i m r e y h e l p e d ensure partners could manage important transitions and meet demand. Partners want transparency about the supply chain and flexibility to meet customer requirements, and Intel has been collaborating with them.

Q u o y e ser led the development of a multi-cloud strategy. This will enable partners to grow with Intel across private, hybrid and public cloud deployments, and will encourage the ramp of technical and solutions acumen.

Jones oversaw partner program strategy through COVID-19 and drove the initiative to increase investment in the community. He led his team to embrace a new channel sales structure and messaging focused on the contact center.

Intelex was acquired in 2019 by Fortive. In 2020 as the company was being integrated into Fortive, Duda was able to get buy-in and investment from the new leadership on her ecosystem vision and strategy.

Intelisys, a

Intermedia

Ivanti

Juniper Networks

Kaseya

Mark Morgan

COO, Chief Revenue Officer

VP, Global Channels

VP, Global Channels, Virtual Sales

VP, Business Development

Recognizing early that C OVI D-19 was going to accelerate change, Morgan challenged his team to rethink Intelisys’ value offering— partner support needs, growth goals, recruiting and retention, and productivity drivers.

In a difficult 2020, McCormick emphasized compassion, empathy and being there for one another within his team.

He said he couldn’t be more proud that the team continues to demonstrate passion, resilience and care.

At the start of 2020, Abad rationalized the partner base, introduced a new services program and launched programs with rich guaranteed commission rewards.

In his short time with Juniper, Macintosh has implemented a new operating model, redesigned how Juniper segments partners, and evolved coverage and compensation to drive greater alignment and impact.

Solomon shifted the paradigm of how the various Kaseya business units do business from in-person to virtual events. He set the standard with thought-leadership-led events and spearheaded multiple new events that are unique in the channel.

Kaseya

Kaspersky

Kensington

Keyfactor

KnowBe4

SVP, Channel, Community

Head of B2B Channel, North America

Sr. Director, Sales

Sr. Director, Global Channel Sales, Operations

SVP, Global Channel, International Sales

ScanSource company

President

Dan Tomaszewski

Jonathan McCormick

Matthew Courchesne

Gary Abad

Kathrin Esposito

Gordon Mackintosh

BJ Ferguson

Matt Solomon

Tony Jennings

Tomaszewski built a channel program for MSPs for all Kaseya companies, extending a program originally built for ID Agent. There are 7,000-plus partners inside Powered Services, growing by 200 a month.

Courchesne invented new ways to keep partners engaged through a variety of creative virtual events.

He also spearheaded the launch of Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response Optimum, filling a gap in the SMB portfolio.

Esposito grew partner sales by 125 percent and drove new opportunities for workfrom-home and learn-from home. She also increased the amount of inventory available on needed workfrom-home products.

Certificate management and PKI is quite a technical sale. Ferguson created a sales and technical enablement process for partners to be able to position Keyfactor’s product to customers and prospects.

Jennings drove a channel marketing focus throughout the organization and demonstrated the value of marketing to and through partners. He simplified partner engagement and made key investments.

Komprise

Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A.

Laserfiche

Laserfiche

Laserfiche

Director, Sales Operations, Customer Success

Director, Channel Sales

Laura Blackmer

Director, Presales, Technical Training

During the first few weeks of the pandemic, Blackmer talked to over 100 dealers to see how she could help.

Key was keeping dealers’ salespeople focused on selling as owners tackled business continuity issues.

Chan collaborated with team leaders to combine channel resource operations such as support and email assistance so all teams have visibility, creating a cohesive user experience for partners.

Mike Munoz

Chief Revenue Officer

Alan Chan

SVP, Dealer Sales

Komprise expanded the Komprise Konnect Partner Program with new technical training certifications for cloud data management.

Munoz quickly initiated an all-channel, all-the-time program.

42

Jeremy Jones

Esther Chow

Over the past year, C h o w has been focused on building Laserfiche’s Customer Success program, which focuses on retention among the existing client base as well as facilitating customer expansion.

Taylor Grosso

G r o s s o i m p l e mented a program of quarterly business reviews and indepth technical training to increase the strategic and technical abilities of channel managers. Laserfiche has experienced strong channel growth.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/11/21 9:01 PM

How To

Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

ADVERTISEMENT

Hitachi Vantara Invests In Partner Success Program Flexibility Powers Partner Growth

Q. Where are the opportunities for Hitachi Vantara partners today?

A. The opportunities for partners can be found across our entire portfolio — wherever

they have skills, competencies, solutions and services or business objectives. This can mean engagement in core data center business or in areas like data analytics, data governance, modernization, cloud services, virtualization, containerization, manufacturing insights, COVID-19 safety, IoT and smart cities.

We understand that our partners are continually transforming to meet the changing needs of their customers. We see traditional resellers building up IoT and analytics practices and moving to support hybrid cloud. Similarly, systems integrator and ISV partners are making new bets around specific vertical industries, such as financial services, manufacturing, transportation and healthcare, deepening their expertise and offering high-value solutions and services.

Our Hitachi Vantara Partner Program offers our partners flexibility and choice. They pick the business models and the focus areas based on their business goals and objectives and we will engage with them to accelerate the achievement of these goals.

The opportunities are endless.

Q. What are your goals for the Hitachi Vantara partner ecosystem in 2021?

A. We have several goals related to our partner business in 2021. We’re laser-focused on improving partner profitability, accelerating growth and increasing partner-driven revenues. This is true across all segmentations and geographies, but it’s particularly true in the commercial midmarket space where the opportunity is massive.

Our partners will play a growing role in our go-to-market efforts in this arena to provide scale and expand reach, support new opportunities and deliver services and solutions.

Q. How are you investing to support the achievement of these objectives?

A. The key to achieving these goals will be continued investment in portfolio innovation, as well as the incentives, systems and tools required to ensure that our partners can grow a profitable business with us.

One area of focus is around the commercial midmarket. On the heels of our launch of new Hitachi VSP E Series midrange storage offerings, we’re doubling down with new partner incentives, tools and systems to create new market opportunities for Hitachi Vantara and our partners.

Mark Ablett

”

Chief Revenue Officer, Hitachi Vantara

Our Hitachi Vantara Partner Program offers our partners flexibility and choice. They pick the business models and the focus areas based on their business goals and objectives and we will engage with them to accelerate the achievement of these goals.

”

Of course, we must continue to make it easier for our partners to do business with us across our entire portfolio. As such, we will invest in the resources required to support our partners when and where needed, but most importantly, in the tools and systems to increase automation and self-service and provide greater transparency and collaboration.

Hitachi Vantara is committed to driving mutual success, built on a predictable, profitable and pioneering partner experience. Learn more at www.hitachivantara.com/partners

CRN_Hitachi_Feb2021_HowTo.indd 1

2/12/21 1:04 PM

2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Lenovo

Lenovo

Lexmark

Liongard

Liqid

North America Channel Chief, Data Center Group

VP, North America Channel, Intelligent Devices Group

VP, North American Channel Sales

Founder, CEO

VP, Global Channel

Steve Biondi

Greg Chavers

Joe Alapat

Nader Soudah

B i o n d i rebuilt and deployed a new partner program designed to significantly reward partners for growth. He also restructured coverage to give partners premium support regardless of their “metal” status.

Cato transformed how L e n o v o engages and supports its channel ecosystem. He has invested resources in co-marketing and partner communications and has established Lenovo partner communities.

Chavers improved channel training content and launched the Lexmark Connect program. He also created hybrid sales teams to drive larger account opportunities in collaboration with partners.

Alapat promoted the channel and the MSP industry with investors and end customers to validate why MSPs are pivotal in driving digital transformation. This year has been unique, and he has messaged even more strongly on this topic.

Soudah led efforts to build out several successful channel relationships while simultaneously launching several channel programs.

He introduced emerging technologies into national/ global solution providers and regional VARs.

LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor

Loqate, a GBG

VP, Sales

Justin Duling

Lumen Technologies

Mailprotector

Global VP, Channel, Alliances

solution

SVP, Commercial Director

SVP, Indirect Sales

Sanjay Gupta

Michael Tarbet

Matt Scully

Garrett Gee

Channel Chief

G u p t a launched a partner enablement program, enabling faster on-boarding of new partners. He also prioritized partneroriginated deal registration to provide incremental margin and quantify partnergenerated revenue.

T a r b e t focused on LogicMonitor’s channel partnership strategy, specifically on go-to-market initiatives. To ensure success with this strategy, a new partner enablement program is now expediting the partner on-boarding process.

Duling negotiated and restructured long-term agreements with key tier-one partners that supported mutual financial, product and technology benefits and helped partners accelerate their strategic cloud-first objectives.

Gee collaborated with Lumen’s Partner Advisory Council on program enhancements, including an improved channel-integrated engagement policy. He also simplified MDF and incentive programs.

Scully created the first Advisory Board at Mailprotector, which gives channel represent ation to all departments, from the goto-market approach to the company’s product road map.

Malwarebytes

Masergy Communications

McAfee

Microsoft

Mimecast

Jim Glackin

SVP, Global Enterprise Channels, Alliances, OEM

Corporate VP, One Commercial Partner

VP, Channel Sales

LaPeters launched a new MSP program, delivering over 1,000 new partners to the ecosystem within 10 months. It includes a new usage-based billing model and overhaul of the partner experience.

Glackin is helping Masergy reignite the channel, reinvigorating the program from top to bottom.

He shapes the strategy, identifying where more investment is needed and adding more dedicated people and resources.

Curry led the rollout of the “Channel First” initiative at McAfee. Working with leaders across products, sales and services, she is ensuring that the channel is included in everything the company does.

F a c i n g unpreced e n t e d disruption with the pandemic, partner feedback was critical. Schuster drove adaptations to the partner programs that gave organizations flexibility so they could continue delivering on customer needs.

Mills worked closely with his team to improve Mimecast’s position and alignment with enterprise-facing partners as well as SLEDfocused partners. He has also worked to sign and ramp partners with different routes to market.

Mitel

monday.com

Morpheus Data

MSP360

Nerdio

SVP, Americas Channels

Director, North American Channel Partnerships

Director, Channels

CEO

Chief Revenue Officer

Mike LaPeters

VP, Worldwide MSP, Channel Programs

John Lindsley

Lindsley integrated separate channel teams into one Americas Channels organization and improved the partner coverage model around Mitel’s highest-value, highestpotential partners. He also refreshed partner rules of engagement.

44

Rob Cato

SVP, Global Channel

Alexandra Detweiler

The monday. com North American channel launched several months ago.

Detweiler’s mission is to drive value and net-new revenue via partners. Since the start of her tenure, the company has gone from one to 20 partners.

Kathleen Curry

Gul Paryani

Paryani is a key member of the channel team, evangelizing solution value to partners across the Americas. In 2020, he was instrumental in developing Morpheus’ distribution strategy as well as refining its partner focus and strategy for 2021.

Gavriella Schuster

Brian Helwig H e l w i g offered free MSP360 Managed B a ck u p for Desktop licenses to MSPs and other zerocost resources during the pandemic. He also helped MSPs grow through MSP University, which provides education on common functional areas.

Kurt Mills

Joseph Landes

L a n d e s established Nerdio’s enterprise partner channel with 5 0 new end-user-computing partners to complement its MSP partner channel.

His efforts also led to the activation of 12 new distributors worldwide.

FEBRUARY 2021

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2/7/21 10:19 AM

2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS NetApp

NetApp

NetFortris

Netskope

Netskope

Channel Chief, Americas

Head of Global Partner Go-To-Market, Programs

VP, Channel Sales

Head of Global Channels, Alliances Marketing

VP, Alliances, Global Channel Sales

Jim Elder

Shawn Berry

Melissa Nacerino

David Rogers

E l d e r realigned partner manager resources to strengthen the collaboration between partners and a newly structured end-user sales team. He also transformed the channel engagement model to a weekly virtual partner engagement model.

Lamborn simplified incentive programs and fully integrated cloud partners into the Unified Partner P r o g r a m . H e q u i ck l y deployed a business continuity program at the onset of the pandemic to support partners globally.

U n d e r Berry’s leadership, NetFortris has added channel managers and expanded its channel leadership and marketing teams. In addition, partner recruiting and quoting is at an all-time high.

Nacerino delivered new enablement and marketing programs to partners.

She also recently initiated a new partner marketing planning methodology to enhance the efficacy of joint marketing efforts.

R o g e r s scaled the channel organization to provide even more dedicated support for partners. He also evolved the strategy to focus on large global security solution providers, which have seen tripledigit growth.

Netsurion

New Relic

Nextiva

Nitel

SVP, Channel Sales, Alliances

VP, Alliances, Channels

Nexsan, a StorCentric Company Read Fenner

Chief Revenue Officer

EVP, Sales, Marketing

Guy Cunningham

Raj Ramanujam

Eric Martorano

Mark Dickey

VP, Global Sales

In the midst of the pand e m i c , C u n n i gham’s team had to rethink its approach.

It revised the deal partner profile and added strategic partnerships that enhanced Netsurion’s Managed Threat Protection Platform.

Ramanujam helped establish New Relic’s multi-cloud strategy and vision and roll out the New Relic technology partner program. He also launched a strategic collaboration and partnership with AWS.

Nexsan is part of the StorCentric family, and Fenner has integrated several new company teams. He has worked behind the scenes to strengthen channel program processes and the LeadGuard program.

Martorano expanded the channel ranks with the addition of a channel development team focused on doubling down on new partner acquisitions and an enterprise solution team focused on driving growth into the midmarket and enterprise.

Dickey joined Nitel and leveraged his experience in cloud solutions to enable companies to evolve in a cloud-first world.

He drove Nitel’s expansion beyond the traditional telecom channel to bring value to a broader ecosystem of IT channel partners.

NS1

Nutanix

Nutanix

Nvidia

Nvidia

VP, Channel, Strategic Accounts

SVP, Worldwide Channels

VP, Americas Channel Sales

VP, OEM Sales

VP, Worldwide Partner Organization

Warren Mead

Christian Alvarez

Christian Goffi

Kevin Connors

Alvin Dacosta

Mead continues to build NS1’s strategic alliance with Cisco to bring its software-defined, modern application and access networking solutions to work alongside Cisco Umbrella as a member of the DevNet SolutionsPlus Program.

Alvarez rolled out a global partner program, Elevate, designed to bring Nutanix’s partner ecosystem under one integrated architecture.

In response to the pandemic, he delivered new offerings to help partners deploy technologies faster.

Goffi set clear swim lanes for collaboration between channel sales managers, engineers and marketing managers. A new Partner Support Center sparks synergies between Nutanix and the distribution lead channel community.

Connors drove Nvidia’s work with Dell’s Heroes and Tailor-Made programs, providing incentives for Dell’s partners, as well as HPE’s Engage and Grow, where graphics-accelerated VDI training helped partners with work-from-home initiatives.

Dacosta led the initiative to invest more money in the channel, increasing MDF, back-end rebates and spiffs to partners. He also built relationships with third-party vendors to help grow partner sales.

Nvidia

NWN

Odix

Okta

Olea Kiosks

VP, Americas Partner Organization

VP, Alliances, Marketing

CEO

SVP, Worldwide Partners

Director, Strategic Alliances, Partnerships

Craig Weinstein

We i n s t e i n led the strategy model for solution providers to build AI and accelerated computing practices. He also defined the route to market and partner ecosystem strategy to help deliver incremental growth and new revenue opportunities.

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Chris Lamborn

Andrew Gilman G i l m a n h e l p e d strengthen the relationship between distributors and the broader channel. He also aided with managing supply chains to expedite products to help hospitals and schools that needed communications services.

Dr. Oren Eytan Eytan’s target for 2021 is to translate the marketing activities into business and gain more market share.

In 2020 Odix engaged with new partners and performed many proofs of concept. 2021 is for turning these activities into customers.

Patrick McCue

M c C u e established a national partner team to focus on top national solution providers. He also created a unified delivery process to establish successful implementations with leading global systems integrators.

Rusty Gaynes

G a y n e s created a channel program and established a Partner Alliances page with partner types, a program guide and a partner directory. He also established a Temperature Screening Kiosk Channel Program.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Onapsis

One Identity,

Ooma

Open Systems

OpsRamp

VP, Worldwide Alliances, Channels

Andrew Clarke

Head of Channels

Head of Channel, Alliances, North America

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

G a e t a launched the Onapsis nCase Partner Program, opening business opportunities for partners to protect business-critical SAP and Oracle applications. Onapsis also became an SAP-endorsed app.

C l a r k e refreshed the partner portal with increased content accessibility and relevance. He also enriched partner enablement to identify and develop new business campaigns.

B e a g l e released a full product and services menu into the master agent community. He also expanded the reseller base with initiatives to align partners of all types with programs that allow for scale.

Nuti worked closely with Open Systems’ channel marketing team to build a partner portal and made sure it included deal registration, content library, co-branded campaigns, lead assignment and MDF.

Hartwell established and executed a comprehensive Google Cloud go-to-market strategic co-sell partnership. He also increased the partner portfolio business by 25 percent.

Oracle NetSuite

PacketFabric

Paessler

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks

SVP, Channel Sales, Alliances

Co-Founder, Chief Commercial Officer

Regional Manager Americas, VP

VP, Americas Channels

Sr. Director, Worldwide Channels Sales Strategy

Darren Gaeta

Craig West

a Quest business

David Beagle

Global Head of Channels, Alliances

Jezzibell Gilmore

Sebastian Krüger

David Nuti

Brian Hartwell

Anar Desai

Tom Evans

W e s t embraced expanded partner profiles and guided the build-out of partner micro-vertical practices.

This has allowed partners to thrive during challenging economic conditions and meet the demand for NetSuite solutions.

After coming out of stealth i n 2 0 1 7, PacketFabric launched its channel efforts in 2020, signing Avant Communications, SADA Systems and Evotek with several other partners to be unveiled in 2021.

K r ü g e r pivoted to virtual events, focusing on the quality of engagement since so many people were craving personal interaction. This resulted in a high level of engagement, which led to better relationships and stronger sales.

Desai led weekly brainstorming sessions on how to stay connected with stakeholders through the pandemic.

This helped continue momentum around winning new customers and expanding the installed base.

Evans continued to invest in the N e x t Wa v e Partner Program to help build the partner of tomorrow by enabling differentiation, enhancing profitability, expanding opportunities and empowering success.

Palo Alto Networks

Panasonic Systems Solutions Company of North America

Park Place Technologies

Pax8

Pax8

Jeff McCullough

Chief Revenue Officer

Brandon Williams

Global VP, Channel Sales

Chief Product Officer, Channel Chief

Based on feedback from a recent partner satisfaction survey, Soderlund increased investment in partner sales enablement.

He built a dedicated team and unveiled the Amplify sales enablement program.

Williams has focused on futureproofing Panasonic’s channel, aligning sales teams with high-value partners and enabling partners to sell broader end-to-end solutions.

Although new to Park Place, McCullough is focused on building a foundation, implementing rules of engagement and deploying its first partner relationship management and deal registration platform.

Advocating for partners, Heddy strategically restructured the sales organization, enhancing their experience through teams of dedicated channel account managers and technology specialists.

He also allocated more partner resources.

U n d e r Walsh’s direction, Pax8 is redefining how distribution works for the channel in a cloud-centric world. He has delivered numerous keynotes focusing on the channel surviving and thriving during and after the pandemic.

PC Matic

Pegasystems

PerimeterX

PlanetOne

Founder, CEO

VP, Global Partner Ecosystem

Perch Security, a ConnectWise Solution David Powell

Director, Channels

SVP, Sales

Powell’s leadership l e d Pe r ch to improve its messaging for MSPs with a deep understanding of their business models and goto-market strategies. This ensured Perch, and all integrations, are aligned with MSP business models.

Holbert launched the PerimeterX Partner Program, built to help companies grow while satisfying customers’ application security needs.

The program gives resellers, service providers and systems integrators access to PerimeterX’s web app security.

Karl Soderlund

SVP, Worldwide Channels

Nick Heddy

Ryan Walsh

Director, U.S. Mobility Channel

Rob Cheng

After founding PC Matic as a 100 percent work-fromhome company, Cheng worked tirelessly from the onset of the pandemic to help companies implement programs and security protocols to keep their remote workforces safe.

Carola Cazenave

Cazenave established a partnerc e n t r i c strategy with investment in partner go-to-market support.

She also launched a new sales process to drive early engagement on sales opportunities between Pega sellers and partners.

SVP, Global Sales

Bruce Holbert

Jonathan Hartman D u r i n g 2 0 2 0 , despite the pandemic, Hartman ensured PlanetOne pushed on with its plans to invest and expand to keep business moving forward and help partners solve for whatever solutions the market was going to need as a result.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Poly

Poly

Poly

Progress Software

Proofpoint

VP, Americas Channels

Sr. Director, Global Partner Experience

VP, Global Channels

SVP, Core Field Organization

VP, Americas Channel Sales

Michael deVente

Nick Tidd

Gary Quinn

Keith Joseph

DeVente oversaw the implementation of a program that sought to elevate channel account managers, providing them with key toolsets to connect the partners’ objectives with those of the organization.

Judy focused on implementing a digital transformation practice as this is where the market is evolving. She implemented Partner Journeys that drive behaviors through prescriptive activities that educate, empower and reward.

Tidd oversaw the launch of a new partner program and tools including a new partner portal and a scorecard that lets partners see their current metal standing. He also aligned key partner programs such as financial, deal registration and MDF.

Quinn’s expertise will enable Progress to further build upon its install base— especially its flourishing ISV community. Quinn has made investments in “hunting” teams to push business to the partner community.

J o s e p h continued to optimize Proofpoint’s go-to-market strategy to enable key partners with a strong security practice and market presence with a boost in the cadence of quality trainings and partner engagements.

Proofpoint

Pure Storage

Pure Storage

Qlik

Quantum

SVP, Worldwide Channels, Partner Sales

VP, Global Partner Sales

Area VP, Americas Partner Sales

EVP, Strategic Client Advisor

Global Channel Chief

Joe Sykora

Andy Martin

Wendy Stusrud

Poornima Ramaswamy

James Mundle

Although new to Proofpoint, Sykora will continue optimizing the company’s current go-to-market strategy of focusing on several strategic, security-minded partners as well as new partners looking to join the Proofpoint Partner Program.

Martin is focused on the value exchange between the partner community and Pure. A new Global Partner Organization centralizes routes to market, including VARs, MSPs, global systems integrators and distribution.

Stusrud developed a specific netnew logo campaign to build opportunities with partners. She also built the Velocity program for a specific market segment in the Americas to meet the needs of a smaller and new customer base.

Since joining Qlik, Ramaswamy has been working to align its partner teams across the globe. She sees tremendous opportunity to leverage channel partners to create scale in the market for cloud migration and modernization offerings.

Mundle has implemented a ch a n n e l program to enable partners to support Quantum’s existing products and the enhanced portfolio of offerings for managing and protecting unstructured data: ATFS, ActiveScale and StorNext 7.

Quest Software

Qumulo

QuoteWerks

Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology

Global VP, Alliances, Channel

Global Agent/Partner Channel Chief

Todd Werner

VP, Global Channel

Gregg Machon VP, Worldwide Channels, OEMs, Channel Chief

Brian Laufer

Vice President

Lisa McLin

Michael Stephens

We r n e r ’ s focus has been on shaping the company’s overall channel strategy.

Engagement with partners, especially strategic partners in each vertical or region, has been fragmented so it has been important to align on critical initiatives.

Machon has built a team of individuals whose vision is to build a world-class channel ecosystem that focuses on the success and profitability of partners, build an unrivaled brand, deliver dramatic sales growth and delight customers.

In his business development role, Laufer w o r k e d closely with Kaseya, Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Synnex and others.

He wrote the Kaseya BMS Integration, Ingram Micro Quote Import, Tech Data CCW Import and Synnex Quote Import.

M c L i n h e l p e d launch the Rackspace Global Partner Program. She also kicked off a new partner ecosystem strategy to pull in cloud and security partners to work with channel partners to expand sales.

Stephens took the U.S. agent/ partner channel program global. He also led the charge to expand commissions to the partner community, widening residual offerings in managed and professional services.

RapidScale

Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat

EVP, Sales

SVP, Global Partners, Alliances

VP, Global Partners, Alliances

VP, North America Commercial Partners, Alliances

VP, Global Partners, Alliances

Bob Buchanan

Buchanan leads a strong team of channel sellers who are dedicated to partners’ success. He more than doubled head count in 2020 across all business units, providing highdemand cloud solutions.

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Jennifer Judy

Mark Enzweiler

Red Hat completed its integration with IBM in 2020. Enzweiler ensured there is now a full, endto-end Partner Renewals Enablement Program that gives partners the data and tools to do their own renewals.

Terri Hall

Hall and her team led multiple cross-functional work streams to deliver a co-sell program with supporting metrics and tooling as well as field sales incentives for direct sellers to drive proactive partner engagement and co-sell.

Ernest Jones

J o n e s was key to realigning and organizing the channel business throughout North America by recruiting, building and optimizing distribution to enhance Red Hat’s coverage model.

Steven Mungall

Mungall led Red Hat’s partner pandemic response, helping partners navigate the evolving business environment, including cost reduction for training and certifications. He also developed virtual labs and webinars.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Remediant

RingCentral

Riverbed

Riverbed

RSA Security

Director, Channel Sales

SVP, Global Partner Sales

SVP, Global Partner Sales

Sr. Director, Global Channel Programs, Operations

Sr. Director, Global Channel Strategy, Americas Channel Sales

John Bolger

Zane Long

Bridget Bisnette

Meg Brennan

Brian Breton

Bolger created an audiocast series discussing market challenges to create tangible sales pipeline.

He presented how Remediant can help partners fill in gaps in their account management strategies.

Long forged partnerships with leading enterprise providers, most notably Avaya, Atos and Alcatel-Lucent.

Combining their market penetration with RingCentral’s products will help drive global cloud adoption at scale.

Bisnette manages partner relationships, including connecting executives and field sales contacts to support goals. She also ensures partners are ready to support customers and create partner-led business autonomously.

Brennan’s mission was to increase engagement with partners, and even with C OV I D - 1 9 s h e s u c ceeded. Partner sales trainings increased 400 percent and she hosted 50-plus partner executive briefings.

Breton implemented new procedures to triage and expedite orders during the pandemic.

He increased communication and added extended hours to support partners in keeping joint customers open for business.

Rubrik

SADA

Sage Intacct

Salesforce

VP, Worldwide Channel

Channel Director

SVP, Channels

SVP, COO, Alliances, Channels

Samsung Electronics America

Bertrand Yansouni

Billy Franz

Taylor Macdonald

J.C. Collins

Chris Mertens

VP, U.S. Sales, Displays

Ya n s o u n i q u i ck l y pivoted to a virtual pipeline generation strategy with partners as COVID-19 hit.

To reward partners for these virtual initiatives, he instituted a new incentives program that compensated them for every new customer meeting and opportunity created.

F r a n z s h i f t e d S A DA’ s channel to an integrated business model allowing for an in-region field sales presence and regional channel alignment. In doing so, SADA’s channel revenue has increased 8X.

Macdonald recruited a large number of Sage and Sage Construction partners to Sage Intacct. He added several new roles to support the partner life cycle and led channel integration into Sage overall, leading with SaaS best practices.

Collins’ priority during the pandemic was communication through individual conversations and weekly town halls to ensure real-time feedback loops, enabling Salesforce to react quickly with programmatic initiatives to help partners.

Samsung has been recognized for how it pivoted in 2020 to make sure its channel programs would assist partners in meeting quarterly targets. Mertens has focused on enabling Samsung to be nimbler and more aggressive.

SAP

SAP

Scale Computing

ScalePad

Schneider Electric

Chief Partner Officer

North America VP, Midmarket Channels

Director, North American Channel

CEO

EcoXpert Program Director

Karl Fahrbach

Nanette Lazina

Scott Mann

Dan Wensley

Virginie Milhaud

Fahrbach and his team received praise from a number of analyst firms for SAP’s C OVI D-19 response, which came as the company launched several efforts as part of its NextGeneration Partnering movement.

L a z i n a revived SAP’s Partner Advisory B o a r d incremental head count investment. She also helped to increase yearover-year sales through partners via early partner engagement.

Mann has continued to grow a channel team that contributed to Scale Computing’s wins in both the Edge Computing and Converged/ Hyperconverged Infrastructure categories of the CRN 2020 Annual Report Card awards program.

Wensley focused on learning the impact and value of hardware and software asset management. He helped ensure partners’ stories and insight were shared with the larger community, which helped ScalePad acquire more partners in 2020.

Milhaud h e l p e d Schneider Electric achieve over 25 percent growth in building management solutions through partners. This has been supported by a partner conversion campaign to enter new companies working with competitors.

Sectigo

Secureworks

SecurityScorecard

Securonix

SentinelOne

President, Channels, Partnerships

SVP, Chief Channel Officer

Sr. Director, Worldwide Channels

VP, Global MSSP Business

VP, Global Channels

Michael Fowler

F o w l e r s p e a r h e a d e d the delivery of the new Sectigo Web Security Platform, as well as the acquisition of two key channel partners in Europe. He also established a new partner program and enablement team.

Maureen Perrelli

Perrelli j o i n e d Secureworks to build a robust global channel program focused on establishing new relationships with technology resale, alliance, MSSP and distribution partners while also expanding relationships with Dell’s brands.

Nicole Stavroff

Partner relationships are a top priority for Stavroff, leveraging past ones and strengthening existing ones. This focus has accelerated awareness and increased the fiscal year 2021 deal registration pipeline by over 56 percent.

David Wagner

Wagner revamped Securonix’s channel program, including qualifications for entry, targets, revenue goals and pricing strategy.

He has signed 20 midmarket MSSPs, going from generating less than 1 percent in revenue to over 20 percent.

Ken Marks

Marks implemented a structured focus on business planning with key partners, outlining joint investments for growth and how to help them differentiate themselves from their own competition by building a SentinelOne practice.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS ServiceNow

Sharp Electronics

Sharp Electronics

Sherweb

Sherweb

SVP, Global Alliances, Partner Ecosystem

VP, Marketing

SVP, B2B Channel Sales

VP, Sales, Marketing

Head of Pre-sales

David Parsons

John Sheehan

Marc-André Fontaine

Michael Slater

Parsons oversaw the creation of ServiceNow Partner Industry Solutions for the global partner ecosystem and launched the Built on Now program that enables partners to build and distribute digital workflows for the Now Platform at scale.

M a d a i o worked with the team to provide real-time channel program modifications to maximize dealer success during the pandemic, including providing purchasing target modifications to match pandemic market changes.

As COVID19 impacted the reseller business, Sheehan worked with sales teams to ensure actions were supporting resellers. He led key initiatives to keep partners engaged in training and building a sales pipeline.

Fontaine developed g r o w t h plans with partners, enabling them to reach their goals while futureproofing their business.

He was key to Sherweb’s MBA for MSP program, which offers hands-on training, strategic sessions and training paths.

S l a t e r developed programs that enable partners to sell and better support their customers and helped partners get their Microsoft certifications, developing an MPN consultation to ensure partners unlock all the money they can.

Siemens

Skout Cybersecurity

Smartsheet

Snow Software

Snowflake

Mike Hanauer

Head of Global Channels

VP, Global Channels, Alliances

VP, Worldwide Partner, Alliances

Zobrist focused on leveraging disruption to maximize growth. His program investments supported the shift to digital marketing and the rapid move by customers to purchasing subscription and cloud.

Navigating an entire goto-market team and partners through a pandemic was not something Hanauer anticipated going into 2020. He was able to quickly adjust the strategy and make fast decisions.

Stewart grew the channel percentage of Smartsheet bookings by expanding the sales team’s awareness of working with partners. He also expanded the partner program to include systems integrators such as Slalom.

Allison led the effort to build and execute a new partner strategy, supported by a program focused on delivering customer success and increasing partner profitability. The team also expanded a number of key relationships.

In such a turbulent 2020, Kapase said she is proud of her team for delivering some remarkable results and helping Snowflake launch into the public markets with a recordbreaking initial public offering.

Snowflake

Snowflake

Software AG

SolarWinds MSP

SolarWinds MSP

Sr. Director, Partner Program

Sr. Director, Alliances Marketing, Global Head of Partner Marketing

SVP, Global Alliances, Channel Sales

VP, Security

Group VP, Partner Success

Jeff Zobrist

VP, Global Solution Partner Sales

Philip Larson

Steve Stewart

Chief Revenue Officer

Saqib Mustafa

Jason Johns

Brian Allison

Tim Brown

Colleen Kapase

Mike Cullen

L a r s o n designed and rolled out the Snowflake Partner Network program and portal, which now govern Snowflake’s growing ecosystem of services and technology partners across the globe.

Mustafa helped partners sell and deliver Snowflake through joint scalable marketing programs. He also executed on joint marketing programs with strategic partners including Salesforce, AWS, Deloitte and others.

Johns built r o b u s t partner programs at Software AG, enabling significant partner profitability. He and his team also have worked closely on the cloud business with Microsoft Azure and AWS.

B r o w n reached thousands of MSPs via conferences, articles, blogs and more. He believes education is the starting point for MSPs to secure themselves and their customers, and he is passionate about helping them.

C u l l e n helped MSP partners embrace the MSP Institute and Head Nerds.

These two initiatives have helped keep MSPs focused on building a better business and delivering a better experience.

SolarWinds MSP

SolarWinds MSP

SonicWall

SonicWall

SonicWall

VP, Customer Success

Director, Sales

VP, Channel Sales

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

SVP, Chief Revenue Officer

Leo Sanchez

Sanchez built out the customer success organization and the customer success team. His team created an improved experience for partners encompassing tech support, non-tech support and the Head Nerds group.

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Bob Madaio

David Weeks

W e e k s worked with partners throughout 2020 (preand post-COVID-19) with training programs and goto-market initiatives to help ensure their growth. This included hands-on support to help them better target and land opportunities.

David Bankemper Bankemper h e l p e d drive investment in and adoption of SonicWall’s MSSP program. He added a Partner Technical Advisory Board to fully integrate partners into product development and beta programs.

HoJin Kim

Kim drove adoption of SonicWall’s B oundless security platform, which was key as workforces became remote overnight. He also helped all partners remain closely connected to SonicWall as security concerns and the need for education increased.

Robert VanKirk

VanKirk and S o n i c Wa l l have been focused on increasing the channel team to boost support in key regions. The company has seen continued growth in key verticals including the federal and public sector, education and retail.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Sophos

Sophos

Sophos

Sophos

Sophos

VP, Global MSP

Vice President

Sr. Director, Global Channel Programs

SVP, Global Channels, Sales Operations

SVP, Sales

Scott Barlow

Oscar Chavez-Arrieta

Allison Clarke

Kendra Krause

Erin Malone

Throughout the pandemic, B a r l o w bolstered Sophos’ effort to protect partners and their customers. This meant launching new products into the MSP Connect Program and providing access to digital education and enablement resources.

ChavezA r r i e t a implemented a Securityas-a-Service channel model for the Latin America region. In separating the ecosystem into two main segments—channel and distribution-led—he accomplished Sophos’ goal of “enabling security for all.”

One of Clarke’s main accomplishments was the revamp of the Sophos global partner program. It maintains the profitability and enablement partners have come to expect while expediting the availability of new technology and services.

K r a u s e overs aw a significant revamp of Sophos’ partner program this year.

In efforts to streamline processes and rules of engagement, as well as provide added benefits for partners, the program was consolidated from 17 programs to one.

Malone led several channel initiatives across the Americas, one being a sales reorganization, which created three new segments: SMB, midmarket and large enterprise.

Others included the Sophos Rapid Response launch and growth of MSP Connect.

Spectrum Business

Spectrum Enterprise

Splunk

Splunk

Splunk

VP, Strategic Channels

Michelle Kadlacek

VP, Channel Partner Program

Area VP, Global Partner Marketing, Experience

VP, Global Go-To-Market Partners

Area VP, Public Sector Channel, Alliances, Business Development

C z e j a k invested in innovation and made major strides in the way Spectrum Business supports partners and customers. The company has been recognized as a top-tier supplier by a number of leading master agencies.

Kadlacek spent an extensive amount of time gathering feedback and data from partners in a focused effort to improve their experience.

She launched a robust serviceability API and added support resources.

Cunningham helped create a virtual program for over 9,000 registered partners at .conf20, the largest gathering of partners ever. She also aided in the launch of an upgraded Splunk Marketing Hub for partners.

H u s t a d d r o v e partner transformation toward Splunk’s vision of becoming a cloud-first company, including helping indirect cloud bookings grow 106 percent year over year.

Pepoli has been developing cloud alliances and the consulting partner ecosystem. The pandemic accelerated customers’ migration to cloud services, and she developed programs with AWS to support their needs.

Sprinklr

Star2Star

StorMagic

SUSE

SVP, Global Alliances

President, Chief Revenue Officer

StorageCraft Technology Andy Zollo

Chief Revenue Officer, Board Member

SVP, Global Channel, Cloud

Chris Czekaj

Doug Balut

Michelle Accardi

Brooke Cunningham

VP, Worldwide Sales

Bill Hustad

Bethann Pepoli

Brian Grainger

Rachel Cassidy

B a l u t secured funding to implement Sprinklr’s first partner portal and helped secure and strengthen partnerships with key companies including AWS, Adobe, Oracle, ServiceNow and Google.

In response to the pand e m i c , Accardi coordinated the company’s emergency response. She continued to deliver exceptional remote work solutions to customers and created cost-saving programs for those in need.

Zollo refocused the North America sales team on partners. This involved a redesign and redeployment of the sales organization to ensure 95 percent of salespeople are directly targeting channel success.

Grainger led the introduction of StorMagic’s new Channel MSP Program as well as its new SaaS and subscription offerings, which broadened the portfolio of channel partner solutions.

Cassidy rolled out the S U S E One Partner Program that allows channel partners to accelerate their business transformation. Partners can choose to participate in one or as many as six specializations.

Synnex

Synnex

Synnex

Synnex

Synnex

SVP, Comstor North America

VP, Sales

SVP, Product Management, Stellr

EVP, Sales

EVP, Product Management, SID Sales

Jay Denton

Under Denton, Synnex saw doubledigit growth for Cisco including in every technology and most customer segments. The go-to-market partner acceleration and enablement program yielded strong results.

Willa Flemate Flemate created an Integrated Solutions community with each partner offering custom solutions that differentiate their specialized vertical markets. This provided a forum for partners to provide suggestions.

Darren Harbaugh

Harbaugh led the cloud, mobility and IoT organization to a record 20 percent growth year over year, with nearly 2X growth in the cloud business. He also helped partners navigate through an unprecedented year.

Steve Jow

Gary Palenbaum

Jow’s team achieved success by refining the s ales process as well as driving improved collaboration and visibility both internally and externally with Synnex’s vendors and resellers.

Palenbaum expanded the Integ r a t e d Solutions Sales organization into a full solution operation offering engineering and design capabilities as well as a full suite of on-premises services nationwide.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Synnex

Synnex

Synnex

Synnex

Synnex

VP, Sales

VP, Public Sector, Vertical Markets

VP, Product Management

SVP, Marketing, North America

VP, Commercial Sales

April Petty

Sandi Stambaugh

Bob Stegner

Dave Strickland

Prior to COVI D1 9 , Pe t t y ’ s role focused onbeing face-to-face with partners, so she has had to adjust to this current world. She has now branded herself and Synnex through hosting ongoing virtual events to stay top of mind with partners.

Somers’ team successfully navigated the challenges caused by the pandemic by driving public sector sales across both federal and SLED. His team saw double-digit growth in its GovSolv Program.

In response to the pand e m i c , Stambaugh maintained diversity in positioning to allow continuity of practice for partners. She also took a nimble approach to inventory management and line card expansion.

Stegner’s team created a new strategy to support changing partner needs due to COVID-19. This included moving major in-person events to innovative digital platforms and enhancing the Varnex partner community.

S t r i ck l a n d led sales teams to significantly h i g h e r growth than the overall channel. With new challenges in 2020, he ensured sales teams could communicate differently while driving new solutions into the customer base.

Synnex

Synnex

Tableau Software

Tanium

Tech Data

SVP, Product Management, North America

VP, Product Management

SVP, Worldwide Partners, Alliances

Global Head of Partner Sales

VP, Specialized Solutions Sales, Big Data Analytics, VAR

Reyna Thompson

Scott Young

Julie Slocum Bennani

Todd Palmer

Colin Blair

Th o m p s o n had created focused product management, business development and partner enablement teams.

As 2020 ushered in the work-from-home structure, her team accomplished the transition seamlessly.

Y o u n g developed a strategy to help customers individually manage their small vendor needs. He started by understanding pain points and then built a plan for each partner to streamline and grow its vendor requirements.

S l o c u m Bennani led a foundational business shift—designing and launching the new Tableau Partner Network as well as landing a major revamp of Tableau’s co-selling incentive.

2020 was a year of investment in the internal and external partner ecosystem. Palmer integrated partners into the fabric of the company and shifted from a direct sales approach to a partner-first go-to-market model globally.

Blair has developed two nextgeneration practices in IoT and analytics that help channel partners and OEMs address market opportunities from the data center to the edge.

Tech Data

Tech Data

Tech Data

Tech Data

Tech Data

VP, National Accounts

VP, Global Security Solutions

VP, HPE Solutions

Director, Multivendor Solutions

SVP, Advanced Solutions

John Bolger

Francisco Criado

Brian Ellis

Maghen Hannigan

Kevin Kennedy

As priorities shifted q u i ck l y with global events, Bolger redefined the customer-facing engagement strategy to meet changing needs. This took precedence over Tech Data’s go-to-market plans.

C r i a d o united Tech D a t a ’ s regional expertise to create a global security solutions practice with a consistent strategy and go-to-market to maximize the opportunity with the 125,000-plus partners Tech Data serves.

Ellis is working with customers and vendors to increase capabilities around consumption models, as well as working to establish solution-based sales motions combining multiple vendors into the solution.

Hannigan has partnered with vendors to transition them to new business models like Meet in the Channel and the delivery of integrated appliances and reference architectures to the market on their behalf.

With Kenn e d y ’ s leadership, Tech Dat a has received a number of awards from partners and vendors due to the team’s ability to execute key enablement activities and drive sales results in security, analytics, cloud and next-gen data center.

Tech Data

Tech Data

Tech Data

Telesystem

Tenable

SVP, U.S. Commercial Sales

VP, Strategy, Vendor Acquisition, Recruitment

VP, Americas, Global Lead, NetApp, Enterprise Solutions

EVP, Chief Business Development Officer

Director, Channel Sales, North America

Marc McClure

McClure unified the commercial and enterprise field sales teams and the vendor solutions field organization to help partners transform their business models and capitalize on shifts that blend heritage technology with next-gen solutions.

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Ed Somers

Cheryl Neal

Under Neal, the strength of the vendor and partner community has grown in part because of the new solutions Tech Data brought on to its line card as well as its program development and enablement supporting new technology.

Jessica Yeck

Challenging market conditions during the pandemic prompted Yeck to undertake an organizational realignment focused on the core, the cloud, asa-service and security to ensure Tech Data is positioned for future success.

Bruce Wirt

Wirt overhauled the front-office strategy into a channelfocused strategy without losing the confidence of legacy employees. His leadership team built the framework over 18 months and is now adding people to support growth.

Chris Blando

B l a n d o focused channel managers’ and security engineers’ activities on supporting top-tier partners through joint business plans and go-to-market strategies.

He also leveraged Ingram Micro and its dedicated Tenable resources.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS Tenable

Jeff Brooks

VP, Global Channels

Tenable

Trevor Henney

Director, Channel Strategy, Programs, Operations

The 20

Tim Conkle CEO

ThreatLocker

ThreatQuotient

Danny Jenkins

Haig Colter

CEO

Director, Alliances

B r o o k s worked with the CFO to ensure profitability for partners and the overall business. He constructed new performance-based rebates and proposalbased MDF while refreshing all training and enablement content.

Henney’s role was created to ensure what partners were asking for was delivered. He has redefined partner enablement, updated the Tenable Assure program and procured a new self-service partner portal.

Conkle’s most significant a c c o m plishment in 2020 was casting the vision for The 20’s MSP members to navigate the pandemic successfully.

Because of this strategy, MSP members are not just surviving, but thriving.

Jenkins rolled out a partnership program, adding a number of Gold partners.

He also built out a channelfocused team that added over 20 new employees into the channel program and restructured much of the business and products to be channel-focused.

Colter has continued to grow the channel domestically and abroad as the business grows. He said it is rewarding to see the positive impact of the channel as it relates to the success of the overall business.

Thrive

Thycotic

TIBCO

TierPoint

Tintri

VP, Channel Sales

VP, Channel Sales

SVP, Worldwide Partner Ecosystems, OEM Sales

VP, Channel Sales

SVP, Marketing, ISR

Erik Young

Bob Gagnon

Tony Beller

Kenny Ash

Amy Medeiros

Young simplified the process f o r Th r i v e partners to find, identify and qualify an opportunity. This process allows partners to capitalize on one of the fastest-growing areas within their customer base.

Gagnon redirected i n v e s t ments to a set of preselected partners for funded resources and enterpriselevel programs. He included partners’ sales engineers into the deal registration incentives program as a benefit of their certification.

B e l l e r launched new partnerships to help with the strategy of moving customers to the cloud.

He partnered with the major public cloud vendors and achieved tremendous growth in migrating customers to the cloud.

Through a challenging year for everyone, Ash developed unique and engaging opportunities to interact with the channel community through virtual platforms to train, enable and help partners identify opportunities.

Medeiros encourages creativity to meet businessinitiatives while having fun. Her team implemented a new channel spiff program, virtual partner/customer events including a “Laugh & Learn” featuring a comedian and a “Game Changer” awards program.

T-Mobile

Todyl

Trend Micro

Tricentis

Tripp Lite

VP, Partner Programs, IoT

Channel Chief

VP, U.S. Channel

SVP, Global Channels

SVP of Global Sales

Patricia Watkins

Darrin Swan

Louise McEvoy

Sean Thompson

Shane Kilfoil

Watkins focused on building sales team confidence, earning partner trust and quickly implementing a plan for success. She also launched a new Partner Advisory Council to provide feedback on making the partner program better.

Swan is focused on maki n g To d y l the preferred SASE partner for SMBs. He is embracing a vertical-industry-focused a p p r o a ch t o p a r t n e r enablement and enabling MSPs to deliver a workfrom-anywhere solution.

McEvoy created a channel cloud ecosystem team and focused on strengthening the business with cloud-based partners.

Trend Micro now has a new ecosystem of partners that is growing its cloud model.

Th o m p s o n implemented a new “One Team” culture that ensured working as a single unit, regardless of roles. Aligning on common goals and empowering team members to help their peers has improved productivity tenfold.

As partners looked for growth, Kilfoil saw international expansion as an opportunity. He has spent time helping partner organizations leverage the Tripp Lite advantage consistently and effectively across the globe.

Tripp Lite

Tripp Lite

Tripwire

UiPath

UiPath

VP, International Business

Director, U.S. Channel Sales Distribution

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

VP, Global Partners

SVP, Operations, Partners

Bryn Morgan

M o r g a n helped lead the expansion of sales resources in key regional geographies.

This initiative included adding new members to the team to grow Tripp Lite’s presence in the channel in developing markets.

Kim Walkey

Dealing with uncertainty during a pandemic requires flexibility. Walkey was part of a team that pivoted to a digital/virtual platform, adapted strategic direction and adopted business continuity plans to meet partners’ needs.

Alex Bagwell

Bagwell was able to expand Tr i p w i r e ’ s channel relationships beyond transactional to more strategic partnerships. This has been mostly focused on SaaS offerings along with the company’s MSSP product line.

Cheryln Chin

Eddie O’Brien

Key partner program enhancem e n t s launched

by Chin will drive partner profitability, predictability and simplicity. She led the selection of a global distribution partner to accelerate partner led business in a two-tier channel model.

O’Brien drove the alliance between U i P a t h and Ernst & Young. The companies offer customers EY’s intelligent automation strategy and implementation services with UiPath’s leading automation solutions.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS UJET

Unitrends

US Signal

Varonis

Vault America

VP, Channel

VP, Sales, Channel

EVP, Sales

VP, North America Channel, Alliances

CEO

Karen Bowman

Paul Van Hyfte

Timothy Roy

Zak Karsan

UJ ET has attracted top talent from across the industry.

Bowman has signed multiple partners including the two largest master agents in North America, and she has accelerated the channel go-to-market strategy.

Larrabee launched a partner onboarding program, including a new investment in a team to support it. He also delivered an initiative called Unitrends Cares for partners, which increased their margins on any business they closed with Unitrends.

Va n H y f t e leads the sales strategy, s ales teams and sales channels by first serving those teams and their customers to ensure that the services US Signal provides are brought to those that need it.

Roy has invested in the channel organization.

With complete field coverage, the sales organization is successfully directing attention and opportunities to the Focus Partner and Varonis Certified Delivery Partner Programs.

Through relationships Karsan has built over the past 20 years, existing partners have referred more new partners in the last 12 months than ever before. Karsan reached out to nearly every partner to see how he could help during the pandemic.

Vectra AI

Veeam

Veeam

Verizon Business

VP Channels, Americas

VP, Cloud, Service Providers, Americas

VP, Americas Channel Sales

Veritas Technologies

Jessica Couto

Matt Kalmenson

Kevin Rooney

Wendy Taccetta

Mike Walkey

SVP, Commercial Operations, Channel Chief

VP, Global Channels, Alliances

Couto hired a new team of channel veterans to expand the channel focus in the Americas. She also drove new rewards programs focusing on sales and technical partner, complementing a new global partner program.

U n d e r Kalmenson, V e e a m brought in over 600 net-new transactive service providers. This was done with an up-leveled on-boarding program to promote and ensure success for these new partners.

A lot of attention has been driven toward Veeam and the topic of backup and recovery. That’s why Rooney decided to offer incentives that helped partners build their business with Veeam and better serve customers.

U n d e r Walkey, Ve r i t a s strengthened relationships with key strategic partners via new initiatives including revamping performance rewards and simplifying registration opportunities to increase profitability.

As Verizon Business brought together separate channel groups into a single organization, Taccetta led the curation of the team, bringing together channel strategy, sales enablement and program management.

Vertiv

Viasat

Viavi Solutions

ViewSonic

VIPRE Security,

VP, Americas Channel

National Channel Sales Director

VP, Global Channels

Sr. Director, Sales, Channel Chief

Donna Turgeon

Peter Klanian

Eric Stark

Barry Johnson

Ryan Strayer

a J2 Global Company VP Sales, Support Services, North America

Klanian enhanced Vertiv’s deal registration program to provide 20-point margin opportunity on deals as small as $7,500 list price.

He also a drove a partner recruitment program that saw significant success.

2020 saw a dramatic halt to traditional in-person events known to drive channel sales.

Despite this, Stark’s team significantly overperformed against objectives, delivering the best nine months of sales results.

Johnson worked hard to create synergies between the channel team and Viavi teams responsible for overall regional sales so they see the channel as an extension of their own sales efforts.

Strayer has been a champion for the ProAV channel, working to launch the ViewSonic ProAV Channel Partner Program. He integrated a simple yet strong approach to products, people, pricing, processes and profitability.

One of Turgeon’s key accomplishments was promoting reseller enablement and driving multitiered go-tomarket stratification plans.

She also built strong teams and developed leaders within the channel.

Virtana

VMware

VMware

WANdisco

VP, Channel, OEM

SVP, Worldwide Partner, Commercial Organization

VP, Americas Partner, Commercial Organization

SVP, Business Development

Wasabi Technologies

Chris Carvacho

Carvacho revamped engagement, enablement and certification processes. Virtana also held its first Partner Advisory Board, which provided insight to enhance the Virtana Partner Program this year.

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Adam Larrabee

Sandy Hogan

H o g a n realigned the Partner and Commercial Organization to ensure that partners play an expanding, critical role in delivering customer-for-life value across the connected ecosystem.

Bill Swales

Swales and his team embarked on a threepronged strategy to drive XaaS acceleration of VMware offerings; position the commercial segment as a leading growth engine; and create a “PartnerFirst” mindset.

Peter Scott

Scott led the strategy to move to a partner-first model with the launch of the LiveData Partner Network. He also led the go-to-market around LiveData Migrator with both Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Marty Falaro EVP, COO

F a l a r o expanded the channel team and increased the channel sales team by 50 percent. He also signed specialized VADs to focus on large national VARs, government and education, and media and entertainment.

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2021 CHANNEL CHIEFS WatchGuard Technologies

WatchGuard Technologies

WatchGuard Technologies

WatchGuard Technologies

WatchGuard Technologies

Director, Channel Programs

SVP, Operations

Program Manager

SVP, Worldwide Sales

Sr. Director, Worldwide Channel Programs, Field Marketing

Stan Kelly

Shari McLaren

Adam Otis

Sean Price

Mark Romano

Kelly managed the migration of Panda Security’s partners into the WatchGuardOne partner program. This was a huge company initiative affecting every department.

McLaren ensured that the customer and technical support the channel always had access to was available. She quickly added Panda Security’s products to WatchGuard’s price list.

Wi t h t h e acquisition of Panda Security and the integration of newly added partners into WatchGuardOne, Otis ensured the operational processes and systems affected were scalable.

Price led the execution of integrating the Panda Security acquisition into the two-tier distribution model. He was instrumental in developing and rolling out regional- and country-specific plans.

Romano q u i ck l y adjusted business models last year during the pandemic, allowing partners to preserve their financial power while providing better terms to their customers.

WatchGuard Technologies

WatchGuard Technologies

WatchGuard Technologies

WekaIO

WekaIO

Regional VP, U.S. Sales

SVP, Marketing, Channel

Global Director, Partner Sales, Development, Marketing

President, CRO

Channel Marketing Specialist

Michelle Welch

Joseph Tavano

Brian Thomas

Charla Bunton-Johnson

Ken Grohe

Ta v a n o drafted q u i c k response content for service providers at the start of the pandemic.

He also helped develop a new endpoint security specialization for partners.

Thomas led the two-tier reseller P3 migration strategy, and integrated the goto-market endpoint sales motion for U.S.-based WatchGuardOne partners.

The endpoint sales motion continues to gain traction.

Wi t h t h e acquisition of Panda Security, Welch helped integrate channel programs and make the combined company’s portfolio available to all partners. She has kept a focus on partner enablement.

BuntonJohnson actively zeroed in on growing the channel base, focusing on the attach rate of WekaFS storage with AI, analytics, life sciences and financial services.

In his first six months a t We k a , G r o h e focused on recruiting and training a world-class channel sales organization. His strategy includes mapping the reps with the partner sales reps and joint selling.

Western Digital

Xerox

Zerto

ZincFive

VP, Worldwide Channel Marketing

EVP, Chief Commercial, SMB, Channels Officer

Zebra Technologies Jeff Barteld

Director, Sales, Cloud, Alliances

Sr. Director, Channel Sales

Kristy Morris

Joanne Collins Smee

Sr. Director, Global Channel Strategy, Programs

Emily Weeks

Tracy Johnson

During the pandemic, Morris pivoted early to ensure partners had differentiated marketing campaigns. She also increased investment in demand generation programs and refreshed the partner portal.

S m e e focused on the needs of channel partners during the pandemic.

She provided leadership on sales support via virtual means and delivered financial concessions as needed.

Barteld led a team to create a framework and process for new channel development, helping Zebra to more quickly build channels and channel programs outside its core business.

By building strong, supportive relationships between alliance and cloud partners, Weeks has expanded Zerto’s reach and value to customers and providers, delivering outstanding service.

Johnson is providing the vision on the benefits of building a channel strategy versus selling direct, adding ZincFive to the channel community. He is defining the UPS product road map’s primary focus areas.

Zix

Zix

Zoom

Zscaler

Zyxel Networks

Sr. Director, Channel Marketing

VP, North America Sales

Head of Global Business Development, Channel

SVP, Global Partners, Alliances

VP, North American Sales

Justin Gilbert

Gilbert created a Global Partner Program and introduced new benefits for all partners including VIP Marketing, VIP support, a new MSP Masterclass, MPN consulting and a new tier, Diamond Elite.

Jason Macias

M a c i a s made significant strides in helping Zix become a channel-first company by creating the first unified Global Partner Program and structuring the sales organization to better support channel partners.

Laura Padilla

Padilla grew channel revenue 100 percent and more than doubled the size of channel team. She also revamped the channel with different programs and communities, including master agents and federal partners.

Todd Meister

David Soares

Meister built and launched the Summit Partner Track and Channel Velocity Series. He also revised the deal registration program and rolled out a new renewal incumbency program and partner portal.

S o a r e s changed the partner program by adding an 8 percent margin enhancement for Bronze partners.

This led to a turnaround of Bronze partner business from an 11 percent decline in the first half of 2020 to 62 percent growth in the second half.

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CR N S ECU R ITY 100

High Stakes: Helping Solution Providers Find The Key

By Michael Novinson

T

he CRN Security 100 list has evolved as digital transformation and COVID-19 rapidly shifted users, devices, applications, services and data outside the enterprise data center. The massive SolarWinds attack discovered in late December, meanwhile, only heightened the importance of security technologies.

The list, which appears on the following pages, provides a look at 100 vendors across five market segments to guide solution providers on which security technologies and vendors they should consider in a crowded market.

Network security companies are grappling with the integration of technologies, with 5G causing more data to be shared via the network and creating more threats for service providers and users.

And the presence of hosting environments where all devices are connected to the server has increased risk, with hackers attacking networks to destroy databases and get confidential information.

Private equity firms have spent heavily to strengthen their position in network security via acquisition, capped off by Warburg Pincus investing in Vista Equity-controlled Infoblox in a deal valuing the company at $3 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. Other major acquisitions included Advent International’s $1.4 billion buy of IoT security firm Forescout and Insight Partners’ $1.1 billion purchase of IoT security startup Armis.

Endpoint security vendors, meanwhile, are defending businesses from hacks on employee-owned laptops, smartphones or wearable devices, with IoT, industrial control systems and smart sensors also attracting endpoint attacks. Companies with limited IT expertise are adopting managed security services for real-time consultation to better detect and respond to new and unknown attacks.

Three companies on our list secured six-figure funding rounds, including Arctic Wolf, which raised $200 million in a round led by Viking Global Investors; SentinelOne, which raised $200 million

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in a round led by Insight Partners and $267 million in a round led

by Tiger Global Management; and Tanium, which raised $117.2 million in a round led by Salesforce Ventures and $150 million in a round with existing investors.

In the risk, threat intelligence and SIEM space, advancements have been focused on helping companies interpret data and guide decisions for event detection as well as identify potential breaches and threats dwelling in unexpected spaces. The need for continuous monitoring and incident response, adhering to compliance requirements, and managing and retaining logs is driving demand for security operations.

This space has been a prime target for private equity acquisitions, with a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group buying RSA Security from Dell Technologies for $2.08 billion in September. Then in December, Thoma Bravo bought a majority stake in machine identity management software provider Venafi at a $1.15 billion valuation.

From a web, application and email security standpoint, the rapid growth in cloud services has given rise to new and sophisticated threats such as spear phishing, trojans, ransomware, business email compromise scams, social engineering, and malware and spam.

Three web, application and email security companies on our list tapped someone new to lead them, with Area 1 Security bringing on ex-SonicWall leader Patrick Sweeney to take over from co-founder Oren Falkowitz; Imperva naming longtime Infor COO Pam Murphy as its next CEO; and Trustwave landing former DXC Executive Vice President of Operations Eric Harmon to replace Art Wong as CEO. And when it comes to identity access management and data protection, growing concerns around critical data loss, malware and ransomware are expected to fuel market growth. From passwordless authentication to removing excess cloud permissions, vendors are doubling down on safeguarding data and access. ■

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NETWORK SECURITY VENDORS

The adoption of network security is highest in the U.S., with financial services, health-care and retail companies implementing and updating their software to maximize data privacy and protection. Following are 20 network security vendors that offer everything from log filtering and encrypted traffic visibility and analysis to containerized firewalls and SD-WAN for challenging operational settings.

ADT Cybersecurity

Armis

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard

Attivo Networks

Cato Networks

President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Keerti Melkote

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

ADT Cybersecurity established a foothold in managed detection and response following its acquisitions of Datashield and Secure Designs. The company in November debuted its inaugural partner program, providing partners with more resources and an elevated commitment level.

Armis in June debuted a global partner program to help create long-term profitable growth through joint marketing and a program to help solution providers build services on top of Armis’ software. Armis also partnered with SIEM vendor Exabeam to help customers identify unmanaged and IoT devices and monitor their behavior.

Th e A r u b a Edge Service Platform generates contextual data that makes networks situationally aware and ensures no user or IoT device is given entry unless trustworthy. The company also allowed ClearPass Policy Manager to control access to critical network resources based on endpoint security intelligence provided by Microsoft.

Attivo rolled out Endpoint Detection Net capabilities that improve file protection against human-operated ransomware by denying access to productionmapped shares, cloud storage and selected files.

It also boosted ThreatPath to let customers remediate high-risk exposures based on identities with excess privileges.

Cato has launched a reputation assessment system that combines threat intelligence and real-time network information to eliminate false-positive alerts. The company also closed a $131 million Series E funding round on a $1 billion valuation to help get Cato’s SASE platform in front of more customers and partners.

Check Point Software Technologies

Cisco Systems

Claroty

Cloudflare

Darktrace

Gil Shwed

Chairman, CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

Check Point Infinity SOC unifies threat prevention, detection, investigation and remediation in a single platform and gives customers security and operational efficiency via log filtering.

The September acquisition of Odo Security has made working from home safer by enabling customers to securely connect remote employees to everything from any location.

C i s c o SecureX provides visibility across the security portfolio, delivering analytics and automating workflows to detect unknown threats and speed response.

Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defense for Office 365, meanwhile, adds another layer of security around blocking URLs and threat files for those with smaller security and IT staffs.

Claroty has strengthened security for remote access to plants owned by manufacturers, oil and gas firms, and utilities via tighter integration with its network monitoring, threat detection and vulnerability management functions. It hired industrial space veteran Yaniv Vardi as CEO in July to boost its presence in a number of verticals.

Cloudflare rolled out an identity and access management tool that secures, monitors and authenticates user access, and an offering that filters outbound internet traffic to protect workers from web threats. The debut of Cloudflare One means companies can protect their workforce in a flexible and scalable way without compromising security.

Darktrace extended its Enterprise Immune System platform to endpoints, video and chat apps, SaaS applications, and identity and access management integrations to protect remote workers. The company also boosted protection against insider threats, data leaks and cyberattacks outside the office.

Forescout

Fortinet

Gigamon

Infoblox

Juniper Networks

Founder, Chairman, CEO

CEO

President, CEO

CEO

Jim DeVries

Yevgeny Dibrov

Chuck Robbins

Enterprise company

Founder, President

Yaniv Vardi

Tushar Kothari

Matthew Prince

Shlomo Kramer

Poppy Gustafsson

Founder, CEO

Greg Clark Co-Chairman, CEO Forescout updated its platform with new segmentation capabilities that enable zero trust security across the enterprise as well as OT features that streamline threat analysis and compliance automation. Former Symantec CEO Greg Clark became CEO Oct. 1 just weeks after Forescout's $1.4 billion sale to Advent International closed.

Ken Xie

Fortinet bought Panopta to gain visibility into and automate management of servers, containers, applications, databases and more. It also brought SD-WAN to challenging operational settings or remote locations that aren’t controlled, accounting for factors such as ranging temperatures and vibrations that can wreak havoc on IT gear.

Paul Hooper Gigamon updated its ThreatInsight network detection and response offering to provide visibility into encrypted traffic, automate threat and at-risk asset prioritization, and optimize threat hunting.

Its GigaVue tool, meanwhile, collects, aggregates, processes and filters traffic before forwarding it to the proper security and analytics tools.

Jesper Andersen The acquisition of cloud-native network operating system provider SnapRoute has allowed Infoblox to accelerate the delivery of additional network services on its platform. Its BloxOne platform unites network and security services in a fully cloud-native and clouddelivered offering that can more quickly detect threats.

Rami Rahim

Juniper rolled out encrypted traffic analysis for the Advanced Threat Prevention Cloud and SRX Series firewalls, and integrated SecIntel to the Mist platform for wireless access. The company also debuted adaptive threat profiling for Juniper Advanced Threat Prevention Cloud as well as a new VPN application geared toward remote use cases.

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CR N S ECU R ITY 100 Palo Alto Networks

Pulse Secure

Chairman, CEO

CEO, Ivanti

Bill Conner President, CEO

Pulse Secure launched a cloud-based, multitenant secure access service that enables companies to provide users with easy access to multi-cloud and data center applications with zero trust assurance. In September, Ivanti acquired Pulse Secure and MobileIron to expand its technology lineup into endpoint device automation and security.

S o n i c Wa l l unveiled S D - B r a n ch capabilities to deliver single-pane-of-glass management and simplify the needs around distributed locations. The company also debuted Cloud Edge Secure Access, letting customers protect network access to managed and unmanaged devices based on identity, location and device parameters.

Nikesh Arora

Jim Schaper

SonicWall

Vectra

Hitesh Sheth

President, CEO

WatchGuard Technologies

Prakash Panjwani CEO

Palo Alto Networks debuted a containerized version of its firewall to help network security teams ensure they’re compliant in container environments and speed the integration and provisioning process.

It also rolled out a service that helps prevent data breaches, facilitates regulatory compliance and inhibits risky user behavior.

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Vectra rolled out advisory and operational cybersecurity services that enable enterprises to significantly reduce the risk of data breaches. It also debuted more cloud capabilities to detect and stop threats across the full network, tying together attacker activities and progression between cloud, hybrid and on-premises networks.

WatchGuard acquired P a n d a Security to facilitate centralized management of threat detection and response fueled by AI and security event correlation.

Combining its network intelligence and telemetry data with Panda’s endpoint intelligence and telemetry data will enable better correlation and analysis of disparate events.

ENDPOINT AND MANAGED SECURITY VENDORS

The rising adoption of connected devices and IoT across several industries in North America is boosting demand for endpoint and managed security. These 20 endpoint and managed security companies are identifying and neutralizing evasive threats, preventing attacks on servers, responding to IaaS and SaaS vulnerabilities, and accelerating recovery from cyberattacks.

Alert Logic

Arctic Wolf

Avast

Bitdefender

BlackBerry

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

Founder, CEO

Executive Chairman, CEO

John Post

Ondrej Vlcek

Florin Talpesș

John Chen

Alert Logic updated its managed detection and response platform to deliver expanded attack surface coverage with innovative threat detection offerings for custom web applications. It also launched an automated security response offering for AWS environments to ensure rapid responses against cyberthreats.

Arctic Wolf works as an extension of an organization’s internal security team to provide around-the-clock monitoring, detection and response to proactively protect systems and data.

In October, it closed a $200 million Series E round led by Viking Global Investors to acquire new channel partners and build its international presence.

A v a s t launched small-office protection to deliver complete online security for small businesses, entrepreneurs and home offices.

The company also debuted Secure Private Access to provide zero trust network access through an approach in which authorized users are granted access to applications, but never the network.

Bitdefender started analyzing user a c t i o n s to identify behaviors that pose a security risk to an organization and let administrators pinpoint systems and users with higher risk exposure.

It also rolled out a service that delivers incident detection with rapid response using automated playbooks that let analysts quickly mitigate and remediate threats.

B l a ck B e r r y Persona Desktop validates user identity in real time by leveraging machine learning models to create a real-time trust score for laptop and desktop users. It also rolled out BlackBerry Protect Mobile to give security teams unprecedented visibility into their mobile, desktop and server endpoints from a single security console.

Broadcom

CrowdStrike

Cybereason

Dell Technologies

eSentire

President, CEO

Co-Founder, President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Chairman, CEO

CEO

Hock Tan

Broadcom CloudSOC and Secure A c c e s s C l o u d facilitate access to onpremises, hosted and IaaS/ PaaS-based resources and can help enforce controls based on the context of the user and device. Secure Access Cloud also enables granular access and eliminates network-level threats by using zero trust access principles.

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Brian NeSmith

George Kurtz

CrowdStrike Endpoint Recovery Services b r i n g s together the Falcon platform, threat intelligence and real-time response to accelerate business recovery from cyberintrusions. CrowdStrike Falcon Horizon, meanwhile, enables automation of cloud security management across the app development life cycle.

Lior Div

Cybereason expanded its prevention, detection and response capabilities from traditional endpoints to mobile devices to let customers combat threats from one console. Cybereason XDR fuses endpoint telemetry with behavioral analytics, empowering global enterprises to swiftly detect and thwart cyberattacks anywhere on their networks.

Michael Dell

Dell has been focused on developing intrinsic security where protection is built into the environment and made core to the infrastructure itself. It rolled out seven new tools that brought more security to its infrastructure and supply chain and infused them into the process of consuming, utilizing and decommissioning technology.

Kerry Bailey eSentire esCloud b r i n g s aroundthe-clock configuration and vulnerability monitoring as well as threat detection and response to IaaS and SaaS deployments. Its Cloud Automation Security Assistant offers customers a single place within Microsoft Teams to actively manage alerts and engage with eSentire experts.

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ESET

Kaspersky

Malwarebytes

McAfee

SentinelOne

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Richard Marko

Eugene Kaspersky

Marcin Kleczynski

Peter Leav

Tomer Weingarten

ESET Cloud Office Security provides advanced preventative protection for Microsoft 365 users, delivering immediate notification when malware is detected.

E S ET Protect Cloud offers a cloud-based console for managing ESET security tools deployed in a network with visibility into on-premises and offpremises endpoints.

Kaspersky has built a portfolio of subscription services around its insight into threat actor activity and behavior to help capture more large deals with enterprise customers. The company tasked former RSA leader Randall Richard with extending its threat intelligence business to address use cases in the Fortune 100 or Fortune 200.

Malwareb y t e s launched Endpoint Detection and Response for Servers and Endpoint Protection for Servers so servers can benefit from its integrated detection and lightweight protection. It also rolled out Malwarebytes Brute Force Protection to stop intrusion attacks targeting RDP on Windows workstations and servers.

M c A f e e MVision XDR offers cloud-based advanced threat management with coverage across the attack life cycle, easy orchestration and efficient response.

The McAfee MVision Cloud Native Application Protection Platform delivers data protection, threat prevention, governance and compliance throughout the application life cycle.

SentinelOne unveiled customizable dashboards and reporting capabilities to help customers extract maximum value from security data and provide context into the state of security operations. It also rolled out an Automated Application Control Engine to secure cloud and containerized workloads at runtime against threats without human intervention.

Sophos

Tanium

Trend Micro

VMware Carbon Black

Company

Kris Hagerman

Orion Hindawi Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

S o p h o s enhanced its Endpoint Detection and Response tool to help security analysts identify and neutralize evasive threats and aid in maintaining secure IT operations. It also debuted a fixed-fee remote incident response service that identifies and neutralizes active cybersecurity att acks throughout the 45-day engagement period.

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Tanium Risk gives customers insight into how their endpoints are operating by providing them with a score that contextualizes how secure IT assets are. The company also deepened its partnership with Salesforce to streamline help desk interactions by providing more visibility into the IT assets and endpoints a user has access to.

Eva Chen CEO

Trend Micro Cloud One– Network Security targets customers migrating their servers to the cloud, offering virtual private cloud protection at scale. The company also rolled out a cloud-native file storage security tool to mitigate threats across the cloud environment and support compliance requirements for application builders.

Webroot, an OpenText

Patrick Morley

Mark Barrenechea

GM

Vice Chair, CEO, CTO

V M w a r e a g r e e d in May to a c q u i r e cybersecurity startup Octarine and plans to embed the technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud to better secure cont ainerized applications running in Kubernetes. VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload delivers advanced protection and better secures modern workloads.

Webroot updated its DNS Protection filtering service by encrypting data using HTTPS to prevent eavesdropping or exploitation of data by third parties and malicious actors. It also enhanced its security awareness training with videos featuring COVID-19 content aimed at ensuring proper security behavior.

RISK, THREAT INTELLIGENCE AND SIEM VENDORS

The need for continuous monitoring and incident response and adhering to compliance requirements is driving demand for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM). From protecting assets and quantifying risk to automating security operations to maximizing existing security investments, here’s a look at what these 20 companies will do this year.

AT&T Cybersecurity

BitSight

BlueVoyant

Devo

Exabeam

CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

John Stankey

AT & T d e buted a managed SDWAN service integrated with Cisco to provide threat protection that’s consistently maintained across branch offices and clouds without compromising performance. Integrated security features include an application-aware enterprise firewall, intrusion prevention, URL filtering and advanced malware protection.

Steve Harvey BitSight Work From H o m e R e m o t e Office helps customers discover security concerns evident in remote offices and networks, reducing the risk of compromise. The company updated BitSight for ThirdParty Risk Management to deliver operational guidance and risk prioritization to enable more effective cyber-risk management.

Jim Rosenthal

BlueVoyant’s Cyber Risk Management service actively manages third-party cybersecurity on behalf of customers to an agreed risk tolerance, accommodating existing risk methodologies. The company also acquired Managed Sentinel, a leader in deployment and management for Microsoft’s cloud-native SIEM and Extended Detection and Response platform.

Marc van Zadelhoff Devo Security Operations combines c r i t i c a l security capabilities with auto enrichment, threat intelligence community collaboration, a central evidence locker and a streamlined analyst workflow. Devo in September welcomed former LogMeIn COO and the co-founder and former leader of IBM’s $2 billion security business unit, Marc van Zadelhoff, as its new CEO.

Nir Polak

Exabeam customers can license its t e ch n o l o g y for use cases like expedited insider threat and compromised credential detection to increase threat visibility. Its Security Management Platform now helps customers detect improper access of cloud storage objects and defend against threats to cloud-based data, such as exfiltrating sensitive data.

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CR N S ECU R ITY 100 FireEye

Huntress

IBM

KnowBe4

LogRhythm

Board Director, CEO

Founder, CEO

CEO

Founder, CEO

CEO

Kevin Mandia

Kyle Hanslovan

Arvind Krishna

Stu Sjouwerman

Mark Logan

The FireEye Mandiant Threat Intell i g e n c e Suite gives organizations visibility and actionable insight to improve their protection of assets and inform business risk assessments. Mandiant Advantage: Threat Intelligence gives global security teams actionable breach, adversary, operational and machine intelligence data.

The Huntress Security Platform expands detection, response and recovery beyond attacker persistence through services that provide visibility around security challenges.

The company acquired technology from Level Effect to bring malicious network traffic detection and forensic capabilities to its platform regardless of endpoint location.

IBM bought Spanugo to demonstrate cybersecurity compliance in real time when a customer is audited. Its Risk Quantification Services, meanwhile, create risk assessments to help customers identify, prioritize and quantify security risk around deploying new technologies and changing processes.

KnowBe4’s PhishRIP looks at userreported suspicious messages and searches for and optionally quarantines similar messages across all users’ inboxes.

PhishER Security Roles allows security professionals to assign custom permissions for the exact incident response roles and responsibilities they need in their business.

Version 7.5 of LogRhythm’s S I E M platform provides enhanced analyst workflow experiences and Open Collector to simplify on-boarding cloud data sources for more holistic monitoring.

The company has acquired MistNet, a cloud-based analytics platform that delivers machine-learningbased threat detection and response.

Rapid7

Recorded Future

RSA Security

Secureworks

ServiceNow

Chairman, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

CEO

President, CEO

Corey Thomas

Christopher Ahlberg

Rohit Ghai

Michael Cote

Bill McDermott

R a p i d 7 purchased cloud security startup DivvyCloud to help customers protect cloud and container environments from misconfigurations, policy violations, external and internal threats, and identity and access management challenges. The company’s SIEM customers now benefit from broader coverage and investigations into security incidents.

Recorded Future partnered with Microsoft Azure to boost threat investigation and response and simplify security workflows. The company optimized its Security Intelligence Platform to offer intelligence across a wide range of business areas within the enterprise, helping organizations become more nimble in their decisionmaking.

RSA Archer SaaS gives partners the speed to manage risk along with the flexibility and scalability needed to navigate digital transformation in the workplace.

RSA IoT Security Monitor consolidates information from connected devices and applies behavioral analytics, machine learning and threat intelligence to identify anomalies that indicate compromise.

Secureworks Cloud Configuration Review helps customers detect configuration vulnerabilities, understand the business impact of critical risks, and address security and compliance issues around public cloud adoption. The company bought Delve Laboratories to give customers more accurate and actionable data about their highestrisk vulnerabilities.

ServiceNow inked a deal to buy Element AI for its scientists and practitioners with expertise in applying modern AI to text and language, chat, images, search and question response. ServiceNow has more than 20 integrations with Microsoft, including a centralized security response with ServiceNow Security Operations and Microsoft Azure Sentinel.

Splunk

Sumo Logic

Tenable

Venafi

ZeroFox

President, CEO

President, CEO

Chairman, CEO

CEO

CEO

Doug Merritt

Splunk Enterprise Security rolled out alerts that help SOCs refine the fidelity and priority of notable events so that incident responders can address their most critical threats first. Updates to Splunk’s SOAR offering have helped customers automate more of their security operations, making playbook creation and execution faster and easier.

Ramin Sayar

Sumo Logic’s Observability suite now gives enterprises a unified view of real-time analytics across application and infrastructure logs, metrics and metadata. Its Software Development Optimization tool integrates and analyzes data from multiple DevOps tools to give developers real-time insight into software development pipelines.

Amit Yoran

Te n a b l e ’ s Frictionless Assessment lets customers evaluate cloud assets without interruption, quickly detecting new vulnerabilities as their environment changes.

Enhancements to Tenable Lumin allow customers to predict which vulnerabilities pose the greatest business risk and act with confidence to effectively reduce risk.

Jeff Hudson V e n a f i acquired Jetst ack to assist enterprises using Kubernetes for missioncritical infrastructure and accelerate machine identity protection for multi-cloud, service mesh and microservices ecosystems. Venafi Zero Touch PKI eliminates the expense and risk of traditional PKI while still providing speed and control.

James Foster ZeroFox debuted new AI innovation in partnership with Intel AI to help customers protect their web domains and presence at internet scale and speed. The company bought the Cyveillance threat intelligence business to protect the brands, executives and data of the world’s largest financial services, energy and public sector organizations.

This year’s Security 100 list reflects the fact that digital transformation and the COVID-19 pandemic have shifted devices and data outside the enterprise data center.

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WEB, EMAIL AND APPLICATION SECURITY VENDORS

The rate of phishing and email scams has spiked in the pandemic, leading organizations to become more cautious when it comes to protecting confidential data stored on email servers. Here are 20 web, application and email security companies that have doubled down on everything from safeguarding cloud applications and embedding certificates on chips to identifying vulnerabilities in open-source software and protecting against impersonation and phishing attacks.

Area 1 Security

Barracuda

Checkmarx

Contrast Security

President, CEO

President, CEO

CEO

Chairman, President, CEO

John Merrill CEO

Patrick Sweeney

BJ Jenkins

Emmanuel Benzaquen

Alan Naumann

Digicert

Area 1’s Horizon PhishGuard gives security teams fraud response, insider threat notification and response, email-based threat hunting, and phish and targeted attack response and management. In September, Area 1 hired Steve Pataky as its CRO to fast-track its MSSP program and add between 30 and 40 solution providers over the next six months.

Barracuda’s secure global SD-WAN service is built natively on Microsoft Azure to optimize performance and minimize cost by replacing inflexible network connectivity circuits. The company purchased Fyde in November to provide employees and contractors working from home on BYOD equipment with secure access to cloud or on-premises applications and workloads.

C h e ck m a r x S CA helps security and development teams identify vulnerabilities within open-source software that present the greatest risk and enable developers to prioritize remediation efforts. The company partnered with AWS to deliver greater simplicity and flexibility to customers looking to deploy application security testing tools.

U.S. Department of Defense application developers were authorized in August to deploy Contrast Security’s platform to assess and mitigate security risks within applications across the software development life cycle. The company l a u n ch e d a s e c u r i t y observability platform that provides comprehensive application protection.

DigiCert Automation Gateway accelerates the adoption of automated certificate issuance, renewal and reissuance by tackling key concerns with existing offerings. IoT Device Manager enables manufacturers to embed certificates on chips prior to manufacturing and generate certificate requests directly from an edge device.

F5 Networks

Imperva

Menlo Security

Micro Focus

Mimecast

President, CEO, Director

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

François Locoh-Donou

F5 acquired Volterra for $440 million to help create an edge platform for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale. Splunk security leader Haiyan Song in January took over F5’s security business to build on its position as the second-largest global application security player.

Netskope

Pam Murphy

Stephen Murdoch

Peter Bauer

Imperva lets users secure data and applications on-premises and in multi-cloud environments, leveraging analytics to alert them to key threats.

Imperva agreed in October to buy Goldman Sachsbacked jSonar, creating a data security powerhouse with tools to protect modern data architectures.

Menlo Security Cloud DLP powered by an Isolation Core has redefined how data is monitored and provides complete protection with the highest level of visibility into company data.

In November, the company completed a $100 million Series E round to scale goto-market and accelerate product delivery.

Micro Focus’ ArcSight 2020 features a unified layered analytics platform and user interface that simplifies threat detection with an intelligent security operations platform. Its NetIQ Universal Policy Administrator, meanwhile, lets administrators centralize and consolidate security policies.

Mimecast purchased MessageControl to provide customers using productivity apps such as Microsoft 365 with more protection against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks.

It also snagged former Forescout global channel chief Jonathan Corini to take the email security specialist upmarket.

Onapsis

Proofpoint

Qualys

Snyk

Chairman, CEO

CEO

Sanjay Beri

Mariano Nunez

Netskope NewEdge takes a different approach to SD-WAN by delivering low, singledigit millisecond latency for on-ramping traffic from any user, from any device from anywhere in the world. The company also debuted an interactive data analytics service that helps customers understand and measure risk through in-depth visual dashboards.

Onapsis unveiled expanded a s s e s s ments for its Business Risk Illustration service to include operational resiliency, audit efficiency and cyberrisk assessments. It also released Instant Recon, a free online service and downloadable open-source scanning tool, to help companies assess if their SAP applications are exposed.

Founder, CEO

Amir Ben-Efraim

CEO

Gary Steele Chairman, CEO Innovations to the Proofpoint Cloud A c c e s s Security Broker help safeguard the cloud applications employees access every day, such as AWS, Google G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Slack. The company in December hired longtime Bitdefender and Fortinet partner leader Joe Sykora as its global channel chief.

Philippe Courtot Q u a l y s ’ Container Runtime Security provides runtime app protection across server-based containers and Container-as-a-Service environments. Its new Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response tool automates the entire process across on-premises, endpoints, cloud, mobile and containers.

Peter McKay Snyk gave developers priority scoring, deep app lication context and customizable security policies so teams can ensure developers are fixing key open-source and container vulnerabilities. It also acquired AI-powered semantic code analysis provider DeepCode to more quickly identify vulnerabilities and ensure a higher level of accuracy.

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CR N S ECU R ITY 100 Trustwave

vArmour

Veracode

Zix

Zscaler

CEO

CEO

CEO

President, CEO

Founder, Chairman, CEO

Eric Harmon

Timothy Eades

Tr u s t w a v e in September began providing U.S. government agencies and suppliers threat detection and response services to address the landscape.

It is also now allowing its VAR, MSP and agent partners to directly resell its managed threat detection and response and professional services.

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vArmour debuted a relationship search to manage cyber-risk enterprisewide, enabling businesses to pinpoint risk and resiliency challenges. It also rolled out a tool to manage user access risks in distributed workforces by leveraging relationships to visualize and control user access to every application.

Sam King

Ve r a c o d e achieved A W S D e v O p s Competency status, recognizing that it provides technical proficiency to help implement continuous integration and delivery practices. It also debuted a GitHub action that lets developers perform a Static Policy Scan workflow and initiate a pipeline scan.

David Wagner

Zix combined the security and compliance offering from its AppRiver buy with its own to safeguard digital communication tools. It also bought CloudAlly to help protect Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, Box, Google Workspace, OneDrive, S alesforce and Dropbox with backup and recovery.

Jay Chaudhry

Z s c a l e r purchased Edgewise Networks for $30.7 million to better protect application-to-application communications in public cloud and data center settings. Zscaler Cloud Protection, meanwhile, m i n i m i z e s t h e a t t a ck surface and automates globally enforced security policies.

IDENTITY MANAGEMENT AND DATA PROTECTION VENDORS

The global data protection market has been driven by the growing volume of data being generated across various industries.

From passwordless authentication and removing excess cloud permissions to securing shared credentials and automating responses to security questionnaires, here’s a look at what 20 identity management and data protection companies are doing.

Auth0

BeyondTrust

BigID

BioCatch

Code42

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Chairman, CEO

President, CEO

Eugenio Pace

Dimitri Sirota

Howard Edelstein

Joe Payne

Auth0’s Bot Detection reduces the effectiveness of credential-stuffing attacks by correlating numerous data sources to identify and mitigate bot-driven attacks before login. The company’s Adaptive Multifactor Authentication only appears when a login is deemed risky as determined by abnormal behavior from known devices or IP reputation.

A new Team Passwords feature in BeyondTrust Password Safe ensures companies can secure shared credentials used in development, test, QA, marketing and finance. BeyondTrust also launched new capabilities in DevOps Secrets Safe so that companies can mitigate risk associated with persistent privileged accounts.

BigID’s enterprise Privacy Portal helps organizations manage consumer data subject rights and privacy preferences for regulations like CCPA and GDPR in an automated fashion. Its App Development Framework allows customers and partners to add custom functionality to act on discovered data for use cases in data privacy, security and governance.

BioCatch bought AimBrain to better detect fraud, including behavioral biometrics, anomaly detection and other biometric modalities, and support use cases in the digital identity life cycle. The company uses behavioral profiles to analyze over 1 billion digital sessions per month for potential fraud and other types of cybercrime.

CyberArk

Druva

Forcepoint

ForgeRock

Founder, Chairman, CEO

Founder, CEO

CEO

CEO

Kevin Lancaster

The ForgeRock Identity Platform was updated with cloud enhancements that minimize downtime, modernize DevOps practices and accelerate digital transformation. Customers will have new cloud and AI capabilities that simplify identity journeys so people can get what they want faster while still protecting security and privacy.

ID Agent a d d e d Passly to its Digital Risk Protection platform to offer MSPs single sign-on, multifactor authentication and password management in an integrated offering.

ID Agent Dark Web ID also added Prospecting Enhancements, allowing MSPs to pull in company data to amplify customer prospecting.

Udi Mokady

CyberArk purchased single signon and multifactor authentication provider Idaptive to extend its ability to manage and protect identities with various levels of privilege across hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems. Its Cloud Entitlements Manager enforces least privilege by identifying and removing excessive cloud permissions.

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Matt Dircks

Jaspreet Singh D r u v a acquired sfApex to deliver SaaS data protection and management for Salesforce with backup and data recovery as well as automated migrations.

It also rolled out cyberresiliency capabilities to identify, respond and recover from malicious attacks with agility via better visibility, automation and orchestration.

Manny Rivelo

Fo r c e p o i n t Dynamic Edge Protection provides advanced web, network and application Security as a Service, eliminating gaps and redundancies. The company added Cloud Security Gateway and Private Access offerings to address work-from-home security challenges across network security and secure access.

Fran Rosch

C o d e 4 2 rolled out risk indicators, which filter out nonthreatening activities to flag high-risk events like mismatched files types and extensions. It also rolled out Code42 Incydr to protect organizations’ intellectual property, source code and trade secrets by mitigating exposure to data exfiltration and insider threats.

ID Agent, a Kaseya

company

EVP, GM, Cybersecurity

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Jumio

Microsoft

Okta

OneTrust

Oracle

CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

CEO

Robert Prigge

Satya Nadella

Todd McKinnon

Kabir Barday

Safra Catz

J u m i o acquired B e a m ’ s anti-moneylaundering screening and transaction monitoring services to strengthen its position in the anti-financial-crime market. Jumio Video Verification helps financial institutions on-board remote customers while ensuring compliance via an audit trail and preservation of recorded interviews.

Microsoft invested in compromise prevention technologies like security defaults, attack blocking and password protection as well as enduser notifications. It also debuted Project OneFuzz, a fuzz testing framework for Azure that increases the security and reliability of native code by finding and removing costly, exploitable security flaws.

Okta debuted a joint offering with Palo Alto Networks that offers a consistent, responsive and secure experience from any location for all applications, regardless of the device.

Its Okta Devices SDK lets developers enable passwordless authentication through branded push notifications with biometric capabilities, minimizing friction for end users.

O n e Tr u s t DataDiscovery helps customers classify data across structured and unstructured data types and automatically fulfill privacy rights requests.

OneTrust Vendorpedia Questionnaire Response Automation helps customers automatically answer incoming security, privacy and due diligence questionnaires from customers.

Oracle Cloud Guard and Oracle Maximum Security Zones monitor activities and configurations to identify threats and activate security policy enforcement of best practices. Cybereason named the Oracle Cloud its preferred platform due to its security-centric architecture and ability to create dedicated cloud service regions.

Ping Identity

Privitar

SailPoint

Thales

Varonis

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Yaki Faitelson Co-Founder, Chairman,

T h a l e s debuted its first integrated NOC and SOC to monitor customers’ IT and OT infrastructure and provide premium services for IT asset management.

Thales added criminal investigations to the range of cyberservices it provides after being granted a license to conduct digital fraud investigations in the Netherlands.

Va r o n i s updated its dat a security platform to give customers more visibility into how users are connecting to corporate networks, accessing data and using collaboration platforms.

The company also scooped up Polyrize to map and analyze relationships between users and data across a number of cloud applications and services.

Andre Durand

PingOne Risk Management evaluates user context and multiple signals to understand the level of risk posed by a user trying to access a resource.

Ping Identity also acquired Symphonic Software to combine Ping’s zero trust identity-defined security with Symphonic’s technology for confirming external authorization into an integrated offering.

Jason du Preez

Privit ar notched a native integration with G o o g l e Cloud Platform to let customers protect and extract the most value from sensitive data. The latest version of the Privitar Data Privacy Platform has new “Right to be Forgotten” functionality and enhanced features designed to strengthen customers’ ability to safely use sensitive data.

Mark McClain

SailPoint strengthened its Predictive Identity Platform with an access modeling service that speeds rules creation, using AI to identify similar groupings of users and access to suggest potential roles. Its Cloud Access Management service offers visibility into which users, human and nonhuman, have access to multi-cloud IaaS environments.

Patrice Caine

President, CEO

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CR N CLOU D 100

Cloud Computing: Rising To The Occasion

C

loud computing took a star turn this past year for its major supporting role in keeping the economy running during the coronavirus pandemic as it facilitated the day-to-day workflows of businesses and propped up organizations from retailers and supermarkets to medical and educational institutions.

If organizations had been hesitant about shifting their IT infrastructure from on-premises to the cloud, the pandemic was a kick-starter to adopt at least hybrid environments. An already thriving cloud industry benefited from tailwinds as on-the-fence organizations were forced to accelerate plans for moving and modernizing workloads to keep their operations running as the world turned to remote work and learning, more online buying and telehealth.

Top cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud saw hefty double-digit cloud revenue increases in 2020, a year that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said spelled the “dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry.” And the three contributed to a new quarterly record for hyperscale operators’ capital expenditures, with much of it targeted at data centers, according to Synergy Research Group.

Cloud-based communication and collaboration tools have helped keep remote workers and their bosses connected, and cloud-based contact centers helped companies stay close to their customers across industries, including restaurants, retail, transportation, health care and state unemployment systems.

Cloud customers are embracing its cost-savings, speed and scalability, their access to provider technologies such as

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data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and their ability to incorporate third-party, cloud-native SaaS solutions. And cloud providers, independent software vendors and consulting partners increasingly are trying to address their enterprise business needs with industry-specific vertical software solutions.

This year’s Cloud 100 celebrates the coolest cloud computing players—20 in each category—providing cloud infrastructure, monitoring and management, security, software and storage.

Customers are trending toward hybrid and multi-cloud environments to meet their IT infrastructure requirements, including latency needs, and industry and regulatory standards.

CRN’s cloud infrastructure picks range from the “big three” and legacy tech companies making cloud plays to niche and private cloud players and vendors with container and serverless offerings.

Three of the Cloud 100 monitoring and management companies—Flexera, Scalr and Snow Software—were leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms.

In storage, companies ranging from Acronis to Zerto are taking the lead in what IDC forecast to be the fastest-growing IT infrastructure segment for cloud environments.

Security providers making the Cloud 100 are helping cloud adopters address the challenges of management, segmentation, compliance and governance against the backdrop of an increase in security breaches and cyberattacks. SaaS is the largest segment of the public cloud services market, and the 20 companies highlighted by CRN are standouts as the industry shifts from on-premises licensed software to the new subscription-based models. —By Donna Goodison ■

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CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE VENDORS

The acceleration of cloud migrations and cloud infrastructure projects is expected to continue once the pandemic subsides, driving IaaS and PaaS spending. Here’s a look at 20 cloud infrastructure companies with public and private cloud offerings to watch in 2021. —Donna Goodison Alibaba Cloud

Cisco Systems

Dell Technologies

DigitalOcean

Andy Jassy

Chairman, CEO

Founder, Chairman, CEO

CEO

Alibaba Cloud leads China’s cloud services market and trails AWS in the overall AsiaPacific region. It revamped its hybrid cloud strategy and launched a partner program to accelerate enterprise cloud adoption.

It also pledged $283 million toward joint partner solutions and a three-year, $28 billion cloud infrastructure investment.

AWS dominates the public cloud space with a 33 percent market share that eclipses its next two competitors combined. It’s pushing further into hybrid cloud with smaller AWS Outposts formats, more AWS Local Zones and Amazon Elastic Container Service Anywhere and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere.

Cisco is transitioning the bulk of its portfolio to an as-a-service consumption model as it shifts from hardware to software, services and subscriptions. A restructuring is projected to save $1 billion and allow it to focus on cloud, applications, SD-WAN and emerging technologies, including 5G and AI.

Dell is doubling down on consumption-based, as-a-service offerings with Project Apex and Dell Technologies Cloud. It’s making heavy investments in building new 5G infrastructure and edge computing solutions and expects to spin off VMware, its majority-owned virtualization and emerging hybrid cloud software unit, this year.

Niche cloud provider DigitalOcean caters to developers with IaaS and PaaS solutions. It launched a virtual private cloud last year that’s designed for enhanced security for private networking services, and its new app platform is a PaaS offering that automates infrastructure management.

Google Cloud

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

IBM

Lenovo

CEO

Chairman, CEO

Lumen Technologies

Daniel Zhang

Chairman, CEO, Alibaba Group

Thomas Kurian CEO

G o o g l e Cloud’s momentum is driven by its data processing and analytics strengths, plus its multi-cloud strategy that includes its hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform.

The No. 3 cloud provider continues its enterprise push with industry-specific vertical solutions such as Lending DocAI and Cloud Healthcare API.

Amazon Web Services

Chuck Robbins

Michael Dell

Yancey Spruill

CEO

Antonio Neri President, CEO Revenue returned to pre-coronavirus revenue levels with a fourth-quarter rebound for the edge-to-cloud, PaaS company. H PE moved its pay-per-use GreenLake channel model to a standardized group of 17 “building block” cloud service offerings to simplify time to value and market.

Arvind Krishna

Yang Yuanqing

Jeff Storey

President, CEO

Big Blue plans to split into two companies with a spin-off of its Global Technology Services’ managed infrastructure services unit into a new publicly traded company by the end of 2021. IBM will focus on hybrid cloud computing and digital transformation, while “NewCo” will focus on managing customer-owned IT infrastructure.

A 34 percent jump in Lenovo’s cloud service provider segment drove its fiscal second-quarter data center growth, thanks to a richer mix of offerings. Software-defined infrastructure revenue grew 22 percent. Lenovo promised an aggressive as-a-service strategy for partners in 2021.

Lumen’s platform combines its global fiber network infrastructure, edge cloud capabilities and security, communication and collaboration offerings. The company has changed its channel-integrated engagement policy to improve its direct sales team’s collaboration with solution provider partners.

Microsoft

Mirantis

Nimbella

Nutanix

Oracle

CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

President, CEO

CEO

Satya Nadella The number of petabytes c a l e workloads r u n n i n g on Azure has more than doubled. The No. 2 cloud provider is expanding its hybrid portfolio with new tools such as Azure Arc and is adding functionality to Microsoft Teams. Its Azure for Operators telecom strategy provides a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud.

Adrian lonel Mirantis Container Cloud, formerly Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, is a set of microservices deployed using Helm charts and run in a Kubernetes cluster.

The Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes virtualization platform, meanwhile, is a containerized edition of the OpenStack opensource, private cloud IaaS platform.

Anshu Agarwal

Nimbella’s serverless cloud platform is based on enterprise-grade, open-source software and is available as a managed and hosted service or full-stack offering. It allows developers to code only application logic and leave the platform to manage configuration of storage management, capacity provisioning, auto-scaling, monitoring and logging.

Rajiv Ramaswami Gartner named Nutanix a Magic Quadrant leader for hyperconverged infrastructure software for the fourth straight year for its HCI software capabilities and data services for on-premises and public cloud. Nutanix increased its HCI sales organization investments and debuted Nutanix Clusters for hybrid environments.

Safra Catz Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Autonomous Database and Fusion give Oracle confidence it will get its fair share of the new generation of cloud apps and infrastructure.

Oracle beat Wall Street estimates in December but said revenue would have been higher if OCI could meet demand. It is now remedying that by adding capacity and building new data centers.

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CR N CLOU D 100 OrionVM

Rackspace Technology

Sheng Yeo

Co-Founder, CEO

Red Hat

Paul Cormier

Tencent Cloud

VMware

VMware is transitioning to hybrid/ multi-cloud, containers and security. Its $676 million in subscription and SaaS revenue surpassed onpremises license revenue for the first time in the fiscal quarter ended in October.

Pat Gelsinger left in February to become Intel’s CEO, and Zane Rowe was named interim CEO.

Kevin Jones

President, CEO

Ma Huateng Founder, CEO

Gartner n a m e d R a ck s p a c e a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, saying it was the only company successfully repositioning itself as a next-gen global systems integrator. Rackspace went public in August after raising $704 million in an IPO.

Red Hat looks to seize a massive hybrid cloud opportunity through partners extending their practices beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The I B M subsidiary is buying StackRox to boost Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes platform for managing hybrid and multi-cloud cont ainer deployments.

Te n c e n t C l o u d accounts for 18 percent of China’s cloud infrastructure services market. It’s a niche player in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services, with strong synergies between its digital service ecosystem and cloud services, social networking and e-commerce.

Zane Rowe Interim CEO

CEO

OrionVM is a wholesale IaaS provider with a hyperconverged tech suite including virtual storage, compute, orchestration and virtual networking. Its Micro Point of Presence installs and manages high-performance infrastructure that internet service and hosting providers can white-label and bring to market directly or through their resellers.

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CLOUD MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT VENDORS

The cloud monitoring and management market continues to rapidly evolve to meet the needs of enterprises challenged by keeping their IT infrastructure in check across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Here’s a look at 20 cloud monitoring and management companies helping customers maintain administrative oversight and control of their cloud computing technologies. —Donna Goodison Catchpoint

CloudBolt

CloudHealth By VMware

CoreView

Datadog

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

GM, Cloud Management, VMware

CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Mehdi Daoudi

Tom Axbey

Shawn Lankton

Olivier Pomel

C a t c h point’s digital experience monitoring platform helps enterprises improve customer and employee experiences by proactively identifying user and application reachability and reliability. Its new employee experience monitoring offering proactively identifies and fixes device, application and network problems for distributed workforces.

The CloudBolt 9.4 platform helps with self-service IT and hybrid cloud governance. It offers seamless integration with ServiceNow CM DB; Cohesity DataProtect and Rubrik Cloud Data Management for data protection; System Center Virtual Machine Manager for Microsoft environments; and complete support for SELinux.

CloudHealth

By VMware won CRN’s 2020 Tech Innovator Award for cloud tools and management. Its multi-cloud platform gives enterprises insight into their cloud usage and enables optimized scaling of cloud infrastructure to help manage costs and maintain security and compliance with automated governance policies.

CoreView’s S aaS management platform helps organizations protect, manage and optimize their Microsoft 365 environments and other SaaS applications. It delivers actionable insight in a single-pane-of-glass interface to implement least-privilege access and help prevent data breaches and avoid overspending on licenses.

Datadog’s monitoring and security S aaS platform for cloud applications integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and log management to provide unified, real-time observability of customers’ entire technology stacks. Over 400 built-in integrations let customers see across systems, apps and services.

Dynatrace

Flexera

HyperGrid

LogicMonitor

Moogsoft

CEO

President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

CEO

Phil Tee Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

LogicMonitor’s fully automated, cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform gives full-stack visibility for networks, cloud and onpremises servers from one unified view. The company recently introduced LM Logs, a cloud-based log intelligence product that automatically analyzes log data using machine learning and AIOps algorithms.

The Moogsoft Observability Cloud provides DevOps practitioners and site reliability engineers with intelligent, AI-based observability capabilities. The enterprise-class, cloud-native platform is self-provisioning with an intuitive interface. Apps, services and infrastructure alerts are aggregated in a single console for increased agility.

John Van Siclen Th e D y n a t r a c e Software Intelligence Platform provides automatic and intelligent observability into cloud-native environments with an explainable AI engine and AIOps, infrastructure monitoring, application performance management,digital business analytics and digital experience monitoring modules.

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Jeff Kukowski

Jim Ryan

A Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for cloud management platforms, Flexera’s hybrid cloud SaaS solution allows enterprises to manage multi-cloud resources through a single pane of glass. Capabilities include provisioning and orchestration, service request, inventory and classification, monitoring and analytics, and more.

Manoj Nair

HyperGrid’s flagship cloud management and governance platform allows MSPs and enterprises to deliver financial governance, security and compliance governance, and identity and access governance across multiple public clouds. It’s powered by a predictive analytics engine with more than 400 million benchmarked data points.

Kevin McGibben

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CR N CLOU D 100 Nagios

Nerdio

New Relic

OpsRamp

PagerDuty

CEO

Founder, CEO

Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Chairperson, CEO

David Gagne

Vadim Vladimirskiy

Lew Cirne

Varma Kunaparaju

Jennifer Tejada

Nagios XI is enterprise server and network monitoring software providing application, service and network monitoring. Nagios XI 5.8 includes a new Microsoft Office 365 wizard to monitor data from collaboration and email platforms and allows for easier migration of core data and Linux monitoring.

Nerdio for Microsoft Azure is a deployment, pricing, management and optimization offering for MSPs to quickly deliver Azure cloud services through IaaS or ITaaS. Nerdio Manager for WVD extends the native Windows Virtual Desktop admin experience, allowing IT professionals to more easily automate, optimize and secure deployments.

The New Relic One observability platform provides access to New Relic’s Telemetry Data Platform, Full-Stack Observability and Applied Intelligence. In December, New Relic said it would acquire Pixie Labs, which provides a machine intelligence observability offering for developers using Kubernetes.

OpsRamp’s platform helps cust o m e r s manage their IT assets running in data centers, public cloud and cloud-native environments. The SaaS-based, AIOps platform features continuous discovery and monitoring with an onboarding wizard, event management and remediation and automation.

PagerDuty’s digit al operations management and incident response platform provides notifications, automatic escalations and on-call scheduling to help quickly detect and fix IT infrastructure problems in real time. PagerDuty recently acquired DevOps automation provider Rundeck to add its intelligent machine automation.

Scalr

ScienceLogic

Snow Software

Spectro Cloud

Virtana

President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

President, CEO

Sebastian Stadil

Co-Founder, CEO

David Link Founder, CEO

Scalr’s platform helps m a n a g e cloud infrastructure across all major cloud platforms, with a single user interface, API and command line interface. It centralizes and delegates policy administration through software-defined cloud governance to ensure consistent implementation of security and compliance policies.

ScienceLogic’s SL1 Platform is a contexti n f u s e d AIOps platform that can be used across clouds and distributed architectures for visibility. It automatically provides an inventory of an organization’s IT network, tracks dynamic relationships between technologies and notifies users about issues needing immediate attention.

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Vishal Rao

Snow Softw a r e ’ s t e ch n o l o g y intelligence platform provides real-time visibility and contextual insight across software, SaaS, hardware and cloud, delivering actionable insight to control costs, counter audits, maintain compliance, minimize risk and enable employees.

Tenry Fu

Th e S p e c tro Cloud management platform brings mana g e d Ku b e r n e t e s t o enterprise Kubernetes infrastructure stacks running in any public or private cloud. The company provides an as-a-service experience by automating the life cycle of multiple Kubernetes clusters based on user-defined Kubernetes infrastructure stacks.

Kash Shaikh

V i r t a n a provides a cloud-agnostic platform for migrating, optimizing and managing application workloads across public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The platform uses AI for IT operations technologies and enables a “know before you go” approach, providing intelligent observability into which workloads to migrate.

CLOUD STORAGE VENDORS

The best data protection offerings not only ensure data is backed up and accessible in a disaster, but also can be managed across and migrated over on-premises and cloud infrastructures. With such capabilities now table stakes, vendors in the past year have turned to more advanced offerings that include Kubernetes container data protection and application-aware data protection. —Joseph F. Kovar Acronis

Serguei Beloussov Chairman, CEO Acronis develops data protection, disaster recovery, and enterprise file sync and share technologies and adds a helping of antiransomware protection on top of it all. The company in 2020 expanded its move into cybersecurity with the acquisitions of CyberLynx and DeviceLock, and the additions of several new security tools.

Arcserve

Tom Signorello

Axcient

CEO

David Bennett President, CEO

Arcserve’s Unified Data Protection platform lets businesses protect data from multiple sites to public and private clouds. The company added new universal licensing to let customers pay based on the data protected regardless of the number of devices, physical servers and workstations, virtual machines, cloud instances, workloads or users.

Axcient’s x360 conv e r g e d b a c k u p platform for MSPs combines its CloudFinder Office 365 data protection, Anchor file sync and share and Replibit business continuity and disaster recovery software.

It added x360Recover Virtual Office to recover data temporarily to the Axcient cloud and Direct to Cloud for no-hardware backup and disaster recovery.

Cloudian

Clumio

Co-Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Michael Tso

Cloudian develops the HyperStore S3-compatible object storage platform and the Cloudian HyperFile object storage-based file offering that combines a full enterprise-class NAS feature set and scale-out performance.

The technologies scale from three to hundreds of nodes. The company in 2020 unveiled Kubernetes S3 Operator for containerbased applications.

Poojan Kumar

C l u m i o delivers cloud-native data backups that provide real-time dashboards for monitoring status and compliance, automatic resource scaling to manage usage spikes, a single set of policies for on-premises and cloud virtual machines, and end-to-end data encryption. It recently launched air-gapped ransomware protection for public and private clouds and SaaS.

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CR N CLOU D 100 Cohesity

Commvault

Mohit Aron

Egnyte

Vineet Jane Co-Founder, CEO

HYCU

NetApp

CEO

CEO

Simon Taylor

George Kurian

Founder, CEO

Sanjay Mirchandani Director, President, CEO

Cohesity offers a multi-cloud platform for data management services that includes backup and recovery, file and object storage, security and compliance, test and development, and analytics. Cohesity unveiled a new partnership with AWS to help eliminate data silos and has added automated disaster recovery capabilities.

Commvault has reinvented itself as a cloud-native dat a protection company, particularly with Commvault Metallic, its enterprise-grade SaaS backup and recovery technology. It most recently broadened its offering with the introduction of Metallic Backup-as-a-Service for Kubernetes and the Metallic Cloud Storage Service.

Egnyte develops a unified platform for content collaboration, dat a protection, compliance and threat prevention. Its Content Intelligence Engine provides data security, regulatory compliance, life-cycle management and platform APIs and gives users identity-aware controlled access and sharing.

HYCU offers t h e H YC U Protege application-aware, lightweight cross-cloud migration and disaster recovery technology for enterprise applications. HYCU Protege provides application consistency, protected migration, single-click disaster recovery and consolidated multi-cloud data management.

NetApp is a pioneer in seamlessly connecting on-premises storage to public clouds and in managing data across on-premises, private and public clouds and the edge via its Data Fabric platform. NetApp in 2020 solidified its commitment to expanding its cloud capabilities by hiring 23-year Microsoft veteran Cesar Cernuda as president.

OwnBackup

Panzura

Pure Storage

Rubrik

StorageCraft

CEO

Executive Chairwoman, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Sam Gutmann

Jill Stelfox

Charles Giancarlo

Bipul Sinha

Matt Medeiros

OwnBackup specializes in the secure, automated cloud-based backup, recovery, replication, archiving and management of data in the Salesforce environment, including Salesforce, nCino, Veeva and Sage. It counts Salesforce Ventures as an investor and in mid-2020 closed a $50 million funding round that included its participation.

Panzura develops a global cloud file system that allows users across hundreds of offices to work as if they’re in the same room by giving distributed teams rapid and secure file access to a single, authoritative data source. It offers intelligent caching for local performance and scalable simultaneous bursting sync so every user has the same view of every file.

Pure Storage started as a pioneer developer of all-flash storage but in the past two years has turned its attention to managing both on-premises and cloudbased data in the same fashion. The company in 2020 acquired Portworx, a leading Kubernetes cont ainer technology developer, and unveiled Pure-as-a-Service in the AWS Marketplace.

Rubrik offers a single software platform that delivers backup, instant recovery, archival, search, analytics, compliance, and copy data management in one secure fabric across data centers and clouds. The vendoragnostic cloud-scale platform provides instant searches, policy-driven management, self-service and orchestration, analytics and compliance.

StorageC r a f t ' s ShadowXafe is an SLAdriven data protection management platform, while OneXafe is a scale-out storage platform for high-performance unstructured data and backup targets. ShadowXafe 4.0 includes Hyper-V, vCenter and ESXi support; integration with business management platforms; and unified hardware and software management.

Veeam

Veritas

Wasabi

WekaIO

Zerto

Chairman, CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Ziv Kedem Co-Founder, CEO

We k a I O develops a cloud-native parallel file system optimized for high-performance NVMe flash storage. Its technology seamlessly runs on-premises and in the cloud. Data is instantly backed up to the S3compatible clouds for rapid recovery and is protected with integrated encryption, key management and access control.

Zerto’s IT Resilience Platform is an all-in-one disaster recovery and backup platform that helps businesses with digital transformation, reduces downtime and moves workloads seamlessly across clouds or data centers. It has launched backups to Microsoft Azure and AWS and introduced the beta version of its Zerto for Kubernetes offering.

William Largent

Greg Hughes

Veeam’s platform helps businesses modernize their data protection, secure data and accelerate hybrid cloud development. It partners with top storage players as well as AWS and Microsoft Azure. Veeam acquired Kasten to accelerate the protection of Kubernetesnative workloads across on-premises and multicloud environments.

Ve r i t a s focuses on cloud-based data protection and data management. Its comprehensive approach to multi-cloud data management gives customers data protection, availability and insight wherever the data is. In September it acquired Globanet, giving it a software portfolio of digital compliance and governance offerings.

David Friend

W a s a b i promises cloud storage that gives businesses six times faster performance than Amazon S3 at 80 percent lower cost and no egress or API fees.

It also provides 11 nines of data durability at only one-fifth of S3’s cost. That has made Wasabi a go-to partner of BackupAssist, Datadobi, Tintri, Caringo, Veeam, Arcserve and more.

Liran Zvibel

When the pandemic hit, cloud vendors went into high gear as on-the-fence organizations were forced to accelerate plans for moving and modernizing workloads.

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CLOUD SECURITY VENDORS

An increasing number of security breaches and cyberattacks coupled with a mandate to follow regulatory and data protection laws are expected to contribute to stratospheric growth in the cloud security space coming out of COVID-19. The widespread shift to work from home has driven rapid adoption of cloud offerings, creating the need for security measures that protect against cyberattacks. —Michael Novinson Aqua Security

CyberArk

Forcepoint

Gil Shwed

Founder, Chairman, CEO

CEO

Ken Xie Founder, Chairman, CEO

Check Point CloudGuard Connect has redefined SASE by making it easy for any user to securely access corporate applications, SaaS and the internet from any device. CloudGuard Cloud Native Security, meanwhile, unifies cloud security posture management and serverless and container protection to be managed in a single pane of glass.

CyberArk Privilege Cloud provides a path to securely store, rotate and isolate credentials for human and non-human users as well as deliver scalable risk reduction. Its CyberArk Alero SaaS offering combines zero trust access, biometric multifactor authentication and just-in-time provisioning to provide visibility into remote vendor activities.

Forcepoint Cloud Security Gateway reduces the cost of owning software by bringing together secure web gateway, cloud access security broker and data loss protection into one offering.

Forcepoint Dynamic User Protection empowers teams with real-time visibility into risk behaviors of malicious users within hybrid cloud environments.

Fortinet last year upgraded its network processor for the first time since 2012 to provide the building block for hyperscale applications, delivering performance and fast connections. It purchased Opaq in July to strengthen distributed network protection from data centers and branch offices to remote users and IoT devices.

Guardicore

Imperva

Lacework

McAfee

Mimecast

President, CEO, Director

CEO

CEO

President, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Dror Davidoff

Co-Founder, CEO

Aqua Security’s Dynamic Threat Analysis defends containerbased environments from sophisticated malware that can only be detected using dynamic analysis of a running container. New Kubernetes-native security capabilities secure applications that run on Kubernetes across the development, deployment and runtime phases.

Pavel Gurvich

Check Point Software Technologies Founder, CEO

Pam Murphy

Udi Mokady

Dan Hubbard

Manny Rivelo

Peter Leav

Fortinet

Peter Bauer

Guardicore Centra Security Platform helps security architects visualize, segment and protect cloud-native applications while reducing risk to mission-critical applications. Its Threat Intelligence Firewall hardens security profiles in complex cloud environments, blocking incoming and outgoing connections to known malicious IPs.

Imperva Cloud Data Security gives busin e s s e s visibility and compliance oversight for data hosted in a Database as a Service, enabling compliance in minutes. The company’s Runtime Application SelfProtection release was updated with architectural changes to secure dynamic cloud-native applications and ease deployment.

Lacework added active host vulnerability monitoring and C I /C D to allow DevOps and security teams to prioritize active vulnerabilities in distributed systems. It closed a $525 million funding round in January to accelerate adoption among digital businesses that rely on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or Kubernetes.

McAfee’s Unified Cloud Edge means customers can define a single data protection or threat prevention policy and apply the rules across the device, the network and the cloud. The company bolstered Unified Cloud Edge with integrated remote browser isolation technology, unified data loss prevention and incident management.

Mimecast Browser Isolation protects users from credential harvesting or malicious downloads as the browsing session is contained within the Mimecast cloud.

Mimecast Cloud Archive for Theta Lake, meanwhile, streamlines governance efforts to enable capture, retention, eDiscovery and risk detection across relevant productivity apps.

Netskope

Palo Alto Networks

Proofpoint

Qualys

Saviynt

Founder, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Chairman, CEO

CEO

Sanjay Beri

Netskope’s Cloud Threat Exchange facilitates the ingestion, curation and real-time sharing of cloud threat intelligence across enterprise security enforcement points. The company hauled in $340 million last year from new investor Sequoia Capital Global Equities in a Series G funding round to address global demand.

Nikesh Arora

Palo Alto Networks bought SDWAN player CloudGenix for $420 million to accelerate the on-boarding of remote branches and retail stores onto the company’s Prisma Access SASE platform. The company also acquired attack surface management vendor Expanse for $800 million to gain visibility into exposed and untracked assets.

Gary Steele

Proofpoint’s cloud-based ObserveIT Insider Threat Management platform provides insider risk detection, faster incident response and broader visibility across user activity, data interaction and threat context. The updated platform delivers simplified and highly scalable cloud deployments for organizational agility.

Philippe Courtot Qualys Cloud Agent arrived on Google Cloud to provide customers with visibility into their workloads and virtual machines with a single click and essentially no software to install or maintain. The company moved into the endpoint detection and response market through its purchase of Spell Security.

Amit Saha S a v i y n t updated its Intelligent Identity Platform to provide improved governance and access to privileged assets across enterprise applications and platforms including Google Cloud Platform. It also expanded its integration with Microsoft Azure Active Directory to provide additional advanced identity governance scenarios.

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CR N CLOU D 100 Sophos

Sysdig

Trend Micro

vArmour

Zscaler

CEO

CEO

CEO

CEO

Founder, Chairman, CEO

Kris Hagerman

Suresh Vasudevan

Sophos has been driving a transition to next-gen cybersecurity leveraging advanced capabilities in cloud and machine learning to deliver enterprise-grade protection to companies of any size. It now is also protecting Chrome OS users against unsuitable and malicious web content with its rebranded Intercept X for Mobile offering.

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S y s d i g launched a repository of Prometheus dashboards and alerts to monitor any infrastructure, application and service in the cloud, providing suggested configurations. It also debuted a five-minute setup for its Secure DevOps Platform to deliver container and Kubernetes security and visibility with a SaaS-first offering.

Eva Chen

Trend Micro Cloud One– Application Security stops runtime attacks before they occur and helps developers pinpoint vulnerabilities in their code. Cloud One– Container Security helps developers minimize application downtime across Kubernetes by easing the security of container builds, deployments and runtime workflows.

Timothy Eades vArmour partnered with Tufin to help enterprises ensure they are secure across public, private and hybrid clouds by gaining intelligence into their application relationships. It also teamed with Okera to help joint customers understand when users are accessing critical business applications and data across complex environments.

Jay Chaudhry

Z s c a l e r acquired Cloudneeti for $8.9 million to prevent and remediate application misconfigurations in the cloud. Meanwhile, the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit tapped Zscaler to provide zero trust access to protect users and cloud services from cyberthreats no matter where personnel are working or with what devices.

CLOUD SOFTWARE VENDORS

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, businesses and organizations that had not already made the transition to SaaS business applications accelerated their cloud software initiatives as they looked for more flexible ways to support their remote workers. Here are 20 cloud software companies that are driving the evolution of cloud software today. —Rick Whiting Adobe

Alluxio

Aparavi

Aveva

Cloudera

President, CEO

Founder, CEO

Founder, CEO

CEO

President, CEO

Shantanu Narayen

Adrian Knapp

Craig Hayman

Robert Bearden

Adobe develops a broad range of creative, marketing and document management applications. In December Adobe acquired Workfront, which develops a work management platform for marketers and marketing teams as they deal with large volumes of content and manage personalized marketing campaigns.

Alluxio develops a data orchestration platform that bridges the gap between data storage and compute systems across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, improving the performance of dat ahungry applications such as business analytics and machine learning.

In 2020 A p a r a v i launched its Dat a Intelligence and Automation Platform for finding, classifying, automating and governing distributed data across on-premises and cloud systems for a range of tasks including data discovery and access, data retention and protection, data governance, risk and compliance.

Aveva, a subsidiary of Schneider Electric, has a portfolio of operational industrial applications including plant operations, process manufacturing and asset performance management. The Aveva Connect cloud platform, powered by industrial AI capabilities, is a central location for accessing its industrial software portfolio.

The Cloudera Data Platform is an enterprise cloud data system for conducting a range of big data tasks including data engineering, machine learning, data warehouse and more. In August Cloudera announced the general availability of Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud, bringing its capabilities and economics to the data center.

Confluent

Databricks

Dataiku

DataRobot

GitLab

Co-Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Sid Sijbrandij Co-Founder, CEO

DataRobot offers what it describes as an end-toend AI and machine learning platform for data preparation and exploration, automated machine learning model creation and deployment, and deploying and managing AI-based business applications. It develops its software for use by software engineers and AI operators, among others.

G i t L a b offers a cloud-based D e v O p s platform that businesses use to manage all phases of the software life-cycle process, including development project planning, CI /CD, and DevSecOps security and source code management.

It also provides DevOps professional services around software implementation and migration.

Jay Kreps

Confluent’s flagship product, the Confluent Platform, organizes and manages massive volumes of streaming data and makes it available to operational applications, business analytics tools and information workers. The event stream processing software is based on Apache Kafka open-source stream processing technology.

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Haoyuan Li

Ali Ghodsi

Dat abricks’ portfolio includes the Dat abricks Unified Data Service and the Databricks Lakehouse Platform. The company also develops big data tools such as the Delta Engine query execution software. In early February, Databricks said it raised $1 billion in a Series G round of funding that brought its post-money valuation to $28 billion.

Florian Douetteau Businesses are increasingly turning to AI and machine learning to boost the IQ of their operational and data analytics applications. Dataiku develops a collaborative data science platform used by data scientists, analysts and engineers for a range of big data tasks including self-service analytics, predictive analytics and more.

Jeremy Achin

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Hammerspace

MariaDB

CEO

CEO

Marc Benioff Co-Founder, CEO

Finding data scattered across distributed, hybrid cloud IT environments is a problem. To manage that, Hammerspace has developed a global file system to orchestrate data at scale, making application data portable, protected and high-performing. Its software uses AI and metadata-intensive indexing to manage “storageless data.”

MariaDB offers the p o p u l a r communitydeveloped, commercially supported MariaDB relational database that’s used for trans actional computing and analytical tasks.

In March it launched MariaDB SkySQL, a fully managed cloud Database as a Service that also supports transactional and analytical applications.

Salesforce has been a pioneering cloud software vendor since its 1999 launch. But what makes Salesforce especially worth watching in 2021 is its deal to acquire collaboration software developer Slack for $27.7 billion. Benioff’s vision is that the Slack application will become the front-end “engagement layer” for its entire portfolio.

SAP has been pivoting to the cloud for several years with its ERP, CRM, supply chain management, HR management, database, analytics and other software. Under new CEO Klein's direction, SAP is issuing an IPO for Qualtrics, the experience management application vendor it bought in 2018 for $8 billion. SAP will retain a majority stake.

Wo r k f l o w software developer ServiceNow has been one of the fastest-growing IT companies in recent years.

In November it struck a deal to acquire Element AI with a plan to apply its leading-edge AI technology to the ServiceNow platform in such areas as text and language, chat, images, search and question response.

Snowflake

Splunk

SumoLogic

Workday

Zoho

CEO

President, CEO

President, CEO

Aneel Bhusri, Chano Fernandez

Sumo Logic’s cloud-based machine data analytics platform provides “continuous intelligence” for cloud monitoring, log data management and SIEM tasks. Sumo Logic went public in September in an IPO that raised more than $325 million and put its market valuation at $2.17 billion—now hovering around $3.5 billion with share values on the rise.

Workday initially focused on developing cloud-based human capital management applications such as payroll and recruiting. While HR remains its biggest revenue generator, sales of Workday’s financial management and enterprise planning applications are expanding rapidly—over 50 percent every year for the financial software.

David Flynn

Frank Slootman Snowflake launched new platform features that enable customers to work with more data types, exert better control over data and more easily access data services. New development capabilities called Snowpark allow data engineers, scientists and developers to write code in languages of their choice and execute workloads on Snowflake.

Michael Howard

Doug Merritt

S p l u n k develops its “Data-toEverything” platform for collecting, indexing and analyzing machine data. In October it doubled down on IT and DevOps with its Observability Suite that incorporates technology from a series of 2019 and 2020 acquisitions, including Plumbr, Flowmill and Rigor, along with several existing Splunk products.

Salesforce

Ramin Sayar

SAP

ServiceNow

CEO

CEO

Christian Klein

Co-CEOs

Bill McDermott

Sridhar Vembu

Co-Founder, CEO

Zoho’s portfolio of 45-plus applications includes sales and marketing, email and collaboration, finance, HR, customer service, IT and help desk. In September it launched Zoho Workplace, a single software platform that combines collaboration, productivity and communications tools and integrates them with other business processes.

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Elite 150 • Pioneer 250 • Managed Security 100

MSP 500: Innovation Rules

By Rick Whiting

T

he global economy took a massive hit in early 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

But the pandemic, which forced millions across all industries to work from home, has made clear just how important managed services have become. All of those work-from-home employees seemingly overnight needed remote IT services including collaboration and communication tools, business applications, security and more. MSPs quickly stepped up to the plate for their customers, helping them keep business running.

For 2021 CRN has assembled the MSP 500, an annual list that recognizes North American MSPs and managed security service providers (MSSPs) that have truly innovative approaches to managed services. A sampling of the list appears on the following pages.

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Scan here to see the full MSP 500 list on CRN.com

In their applications, MSPs answered a number of questions about their business, including what emerging technologies they see as being key for 2021. We have included their answers to that question on the following pages, as well as the number of years they have been on the list.

The MSP 500 has three categories. The MSP Elite 150 have an extensive managed services portfolio, including on-premises and off-premises capabilities, weighted toward midmarket and enterprise customers. The MSP Pioneer 250 have largely built their business model around providing managed services to the SMB market. And the Managed Security 100 spotlights MSPs with cloud-based security services expertise. ■ For information on purchasing the complete list with all collected firmographic data, please contact sales@thechannelcompany.com or call (508) 416-1175.

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Elite 150 COMPANY/YEARS ON LIST

MSP 5 00 TOP EXECUTIVE

WHAT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AREAS WILL BRING THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY THIS YEAR?

Doug Schneider CEO

Cloud-native technologies are at the forefront of enterprises going into 2021.

Application development with a particular focus on data migration and management to support business and digital transformation initiatives are the catalysts for change.

2ND WATCH

Seattle

Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

ADVIZEX

Independence, Ohio Years on list: 2019, 2020

C.R. Howdyshell President

ANM

Albuquerque, N.M. Years on list: 2017, 2019, 2020

ATSG

Briarcliff, N.Y. Years on list: 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020

Security, cloud and automation wll be top of mind.

Raminder Mann CEO

Anthony D’Ambrosi CEO

Remote work technologies and security will be key. The pandemic has changed the work environment, and these technologies and the enablement of these complex solutions will be the ultimate driver for IT organizations in 2021. ATSG has positioned its offerings to follow the market and expects to see growth as a result.

Todd Knapp Founder, CEO

Envision sees digital transformation, specifically in the areas of analytics and automation, as the biggest areas of opportunity. The pandemic forced many businesses to rapidly pivot their operations, adopting new technologies and processes to support a newly distributed workforce model. Envision will be helping customers sort through these new challenges and continue their digital transformation journeys.

The MSP also sees great potential for its data analytics and business intelligence practice and is ready to help customers leverage the power of data analytics to make more informed decisions, better align their operations and develop more persuasive business appeals.

ENVISION TECHNOLOGY ADVISORS

Pawtucket, R.I. Years on list: 2020

EPLUS TECHNOLOGY

Herndon, Va.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020

Mark Marron President, CEO

GROUPWARE TECHNOLOGY, A TRACE3 COMPANY

Campbell, Calif.

Years on list: 2018, 2019, 2020

IMAGENET CONSULTING

Oklahoma City, Okla.

Years on list: 2020

Mike Thompson CEO

Juan Fernandez VP, Managed IT Services

ITSAVVY

Addison, Ill.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Michael Theriault President , CEO

LOFFLER COMPANIES

Bloomington, Minn.

Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Monitoring as a Service looks to be big for Advizex in 2021. Growing services around private and public cloud will be important as well.

Jim Loffler President, CEO

The biggest opportunities will be in managed SD-WAN, managed cloud services with cost optimization, and business services derived from application performance/Layer 7 analytics.

As a disruptive technology that is accelerating digital transformation and enhancing business outcomes for customers, AI will be a big opportunity in 2021. Cloud will also continue to be a focus in 2021. It’s estimated that around 90 percent of enterprises are now in cloud. Mass migration to this platform has been a big opportunity to provide solutions to customers on their multi-cloud journey. Cloud adoption continues to accelerate with advances in containers and serverless technologies, providing the ability to accelerate development and drive competitive advantages. The emergence of containers will also be a big opportunity.

AI and business intelligence will be big opportunities this year.

All of the remote workforce technology, a higher level of cybersecurity, data center transformation, cloud and hosting, and managed services will be crucial going forward.

The strategic opportunities will be around Microsoft Azure, security solutions, endpoint management in a work-from-home world and education.

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Elite 150 COMPANY/YEARS ON LIST

MSP 5 00 TOP EXECUTIVE

WHAT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AREAS WILL BRING THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY THIS YEAR?

Chris Adams President, CEO

Full-stack data center monitoring delivered as a service will be a big opportunity.

Helping customers increase availability and increase agility are Park Place’s top priorities. For 2021, which the company believes will still be dominated by dealing with the global pandemic, customers will need a richer set of data center tools to maintain service levels while protecting employees. Park Place’s ability to offer support services from the physical layer through the OS, transport and application layer—all delivered as a service—helps customers find the right balance of cost, availability and agility.

PARK PLACE TECHNOLOGIES

Cleveland

Years on list: 2018, 2020

TECHNOLOGENT

Irvine, Calif.

Years on list: 2019, 2020

Marco Mohajer President

TRUEIT

West Fargo, N.D. Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020

Zac Paulson CEO

VERISTOR

Duluth, Ga.

Years on list: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Ashby Lincoln President, CEO

VPLS

Important opportunities are around robotic process automation, cloud management platforms, SecOps and DevSecOps instrumentations, ML, AIOps, privacy and Compliance as a Service.

In 2021, there will be a heavy emphasis on software such as Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM. These are areas that technology providers have been able to avoid in the past, but companies like Salesforce, Zoom and Slack have forced Microsoft to lean on its partners more.

Continued migrations to public cloud and SaaS platforms are driving a bigger focus on data analytics and security analytics around access control, data location and warehousing, and growth patterns.

Managed security will be a key emerging technology area in 2021.

Los Angeles Years on list: 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020

Arman Khalili CEO

Pioneer 250 COMPANY/YEARS ON LIST

TOP EXECUTIVE

3 ELEMENT CONSULTING RD

Mechanicsburg, Pa. Years on list: 2019

2021 will be focused on security options for people working from home.

Dawn Sizer CEO

ALLSAFE IT

Los Angeles

Years on list: 2017, 2018

Bones Ijeoma CEO

APEX DIGITAL SOLUTIONS

Southfield, Mich.

Years on list: 2019, 2020

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WHAT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AREAS WILL BRING THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY THIS YEAR?

Jason Lambiris CEO

AI is the buzzword. AllSafe IT is looking to implement more solutions that leverage AI in order to make customers’ businesses more profitable and efficient.

Apex sees a lot of opportunity with cloud voice and the modern meeting experience.

During 2020, Microsoft Teams adoption for remote work and meetings soared.

However, many customers have yet to fully adopt Teams for calling or other advanced collaboration and application integration scenarios. Security is another area with a uniquely high business opportunity—there are increased threats and a saturation of point solutions, resulting in complexity. Organizations also do not have the skill set to address their security needs in-house. By continuing to drive its managed security services, Apex can address this gap.

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Pioneer 250 COMPANY/YEARS ON LIST

MSP 5 00 TOP EXECUTIVE

AWECOMM

Troy, Mich.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Brent Yax CEO

C-FORWARD

Covington, Ky.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

CIELOIT

Lubbock, Texas Years on list: 2018

CISSDM

San Clemente, Calif.

Years on list: 2019, 2020

Years on list: 2019, 2020

DVBETG

Sacramento, Calif.

Years on list: 2020

C-Forward sees SD-WAN as a big opportunity this year.

Imre Szenttornyay Founder, Co-CEO

Matt Miller Co-Founder, President

Allen Falcon CEO

Richard McKinnon CEO

FULTON MAY SOLUTIONS

Oak Brook, Ill.

Years on list: 2017, 2018

John Sikaras Principal

INFINITE IT

Toronto, Ontario Years on list: 2016, 2019

ISOCNET

Florence, Ky.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019

Joe Ussia CEO

Richard Cummins President, CEO

MATRIX INTEGRATION

Jasper, Ind.

Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020

Brenda Stallings CEO

NERDS SUPPORT

Miami

Years on list: 2017, 2018

A huge opportunity exists in training and change management for customers. Most companies understand IT is strategic but do not have the depth or resources necessary in the IT world to properly execute new initiatives. By augmenting these companies’ teams, Awecomm can help drive change and spur technology adoption.

Brian Ruschman President

CUMULUS GLOBAL

Westborough, Mass.

WHAT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AREAS WILL BRING THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY THIS YEAR?

Scott Richman Founder, CEO

Videoconferencing, remote network management and cybersecurity will be important areas of focus in 2021.

CISSDM sees simplifying and accelerating the adoption of SD-WAN and software-defined networking technologies as its biggest opportunity.

Bots, business intelligence and dashboards appropriate for smaller businesses will be areas of opportunity this year.

Anything with AI, cloud and big data will be the biggest opportunities.

Fulton May Solutions sees growth opportunities in working better with its public cloud, Microsoft Azure.

Security and privacy top the list. The fact that everyone is working from home has meant that data is traveling and residing outside the usual “control” areas that companies used to struggle to have a handle on. The pandemic has opened the eyes of several organizations that they need to amp up their security strategy while considering data privacy in this new world.

IoT will be a huge area of opportunity.

Businesses and organizations being able to support remote working and learning and then keeping their assets, employees and customers secure is key.

Serverless computing seems to be a promising technology emerging in 2021. Serverless computing allows users to write and deploy code without having to worry about underlying infrastructure. It’s also a way to enable more agile and innovative strategies that allow a faster response to change.

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2/12/21 12:07 PM

Pioneer 250 COMPANY/YEARS ON LIST

MSP 5 00 TOP EXECUTIVE

NGEN

Lanham, Md. Years on list: 2017, 2019, 2020

Terry Speigner President, CEO

PEAK UPTIME

Tulsa, Okla.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2019

Gordon Martin President

PEGASUS TECHNOLOGIES

Kennett Square, Pa.

Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

PKA TECHNOLOGIES

Montvale, N.J.

New to list

Years on list: 2018, 2020

RADCOMP TECHNOLOGIES

White Salmon, Wash.

Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

TANCHES GLOBAL MANAGEMENT

Sugar Land, Texas Years on list: 2018, 2020

TEKTONIC

Vaughn, Ontario New to list

TRUADVANTAGE SOLUTIONS

Cupertino, Calif.

Years on list: 2019

VERUS TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS

San Rafael, Calif.

Years on list: 2018

Matthew Tucker CEO

Felise Katz CEO

Years on list: 2020

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Security managed services, AI/machine learning and high-performance computing are big areas of opportunity. Also important are the management of structured and unstructured data, single-pane-of-glass administration from the edge to the data center, hybrid cloud solutions and contact tracing technologies.

Security will be the technology ProBleu is most focused on this year.

Craig Hickman VP, Sales

Ryan Kreps CEO

Managed services around virtualization technologies is one of Radcomp’s key service offerings.

Cybersecurity and remote connectivity are crucial areas going forward.

Tanaz Choudhury President

Jorge Rosas Managing Partner

Kayvan Yazdi Co-Founder

Christopher Reid President

WEKOS

Woodbury, N.Y.

Peak Uptime, which focuses on cutting-edge cloud services, sees growing demand for cloud object storage for archive storage, document storage and file sharing, and big data analytics.

Managed SOC and managed VoIP are key opportunities in 2021.

PROBLEU

Bloomington, Ind.

WHAT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AREAS WILL BRING THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY THIS YEAR?

Extending cybersecurity to NGen’s customers’ employees wherever they are operating from is an important focus area for this year.

Cosmo Gazzani Director

Working remotely, hosted services (servers/VDI/RDS) security services and remote worker monitoring are key focus areas.

Advanced security solutions, IoT and managed physical access security are all important for 2021.

Verus Technology Solutions is emphasizing all security products as being instrumental this year.

Wekos is betting on security management and monitoring to increase into 2021. The MSP also is considering looking at smart video surveillance as a potential managed offering for customers.

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Managed Security 100 COMPANY/YEARS ON LIST

AQUEDUCT TECHNOLOGIES

Waltham, Mass.

Years on list: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

TOP EXECUTIVE

Manak Ahluwalia President, CEO

ATMOSERA

Beaverton, Ore.

Years on list: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Jon Thomsen CEO

CONRES

Bedford, Mass.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Michael Hadley President, CEO

Years on list: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

New to list

Paul Anderson President, CEO

Nancy Sabino CEO

Rory Sanchez President, CEO

XDR is in high demand for midmarket companies due to the fact that they are looking for SIEM-like capabilities at the endpoint level but often don’t have compliance requirements for full SIEM services. True Digital Security is building out its SOC-powered vulnerability management program that makes use of automation and other key efficiencies, as the increasing risk of attack has helped organizations understand that managing their own vulnerabilities efficiently and effectively is often beyond their capabilities because of a lack of time, resources and specialized expertise. The MSP sees this as a major opportunity in 2021.

Malinda Gagnon Co-Founder, CEO

Uprise is continuing to integrate disparate platforms for customers, and automating workflows will be crucial. Machine learning as it’s applied to ITSM will be the key driver of business.

TRUE DIGITAL SECURITY

UPRISE

Bethel, Maine New to list

VALEO NETWORKS

Scottsdale, Ariz.

New to list

Novacoast is focused on bringing security and business together. Identity and access, threat and vulnerability management, risk and compliance and incident response are key to all effective security strategies.

For SabinoCompTech, the tools to clean up its own PSA will provide an opportunity to organize and utilize its tools much better as well as find tools to give more data on the customer base. These things will help customer relationships to mature and provide ways to serve customers better. On the client front, integrations to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint will continue to grow.

West Palm Beach, Fla.

Years on list: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020

ICorps is very focused on Security as a Service, with solutions such as SOC as a Service and IT governance. It works closely with the Microsoft 365 stack of services, such as Teams, and continues to create security solutions and processes around this application stack. It also is focusing on security and governance assessments—in the Microsoft 365 space and in other computing environments.

Online event platforms and security will be key.

SABINOCOMPTECH

Katy, Texas

Atmosera continues to see large opportunities within the data analytics, business intelligence and IoT space as well as within its InfoSec Services. It continues to expand its involvement in IoT/data analytics via the Microsoft Azure platform. Atmosera’s work in 2019 and 2020 around its InfoSec practices has paid off and it will be doubling down on that focus. In addition, the MSP still sees a large opportunity within the application modernization movement to leverage public cloud, being able to modernize applications for true SaaS or PaaS functionality. Atmosera is actively pursuing inorganic activities to augment and accelerate leadership in this category.

Michael Goldstein President

NOVACOAST

Santa Barbara, Calif.

Aqueduct Technologies sees the biggest opportunities around cloud-based security, vulnerability management and container management.

Conres is continuing to build its cloud and security practices.

LAN INFOTECH

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

WHAT EMERGING TECHNOLOGY AREAS WILL BRING THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY THIS YEAR?

Mary Nardella CEO

ICORPS TECHNOLOGIES

Boston

MSP 5 00

Travis Mack CEO

The biggest opportunities in 2021 are cybersecurity services and secure remote working environments.

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ON TH E R ECOR D

IBM’s Channel Focus Gets A Boost

F

By Robert Faletra

OR THE FIRST TIME in well over a decade, I’m seeing signs that IBM understands its need to broaden its reach through strategic solution providers.

As we approach the two-year anniversary of closing its acquisition of Red Hat, Big Blue is beginning to get its channel mojo back. I’m not ready to declare it’s firing on all cylinders. But the changes at the top of the organization that were long overdue and seem to have come along with the Red Hat acquisition have started the engine.

Arvind Krishna, IBM’s new chairman and CEO, might be exactly what is needed as a leader of IBM. After a 10-year period where IBM seemed less than maniacally focused on its solution provider channel, Krishna seems intent on leveraging the partner base. Krishna is coming up on his one-year anniversary as CEO and has agreed to come to The Channel Company’s Best of Breed conference this fall to meet and talk with the channel partners in attendance.

That in and of itself is a huge indicator of where he places the importance of the IBM channel. In a recent interview with CRN depicted in this issue’s cover story, he was also clear in his desire to drive more business with partners.

I’ve been covering the high-tech channel since the early 1980s and while I’ve only had one long conversation with Krishna, I’m pretty good at reading sincerity—and Krishna seems to have just that in his desire to drive more through partners.

But he and IBM have some challenges. For a company that arguably was the original builder of the indirect channel in PCs, it has lost huge channel share over the last decade, all while competitors like Dell Technologies were focused on gaining share.

IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer Technologies eight years ago was squandered, and Krishna seems focused on ensuring the same thing doesn’t happen to Red Hat, an acquisition he spearheaded prior to taking on the CEO role.

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His focus on the channel and his visibility to it will be important in sending a message both externally and internally as to partner importance. But his bigger challenge is to make sure the internal mechanism at IBM gets on board and doesn’t reject the need to have a viable channel. After all, IBM is a salesdriven company, and direct-sales-minded people always want control, something that is more challenging in an indirect sale.

So the real test will come from what happens between Krishna and the street—a long road that is fraught with twists and turns.

Krishna needs to be sure compensation internally and through the channel is addressed in such a way that neutrality is paramount. Making sure rules of engagement between IBM and the partner community are clear is also a task that needs addressing. No one expects any company to be without channel conflict, but clarity on where partners should expect a no-conflict zone and where they should understand they may be competing with IBM is important.

Ultimately, who Krishna puts in place to shepherd his vision of how he wants the company to go to market in direct and indirect channels is crucial. His communication internally is critical, and his actions to back that up will be the determination of whether the troops fall in line.

But he also needs to be visible and honestly blunt with the partner community, all while making sure IBM has the right product lineup to battle it out in the market.

Krishna has some real advantages inside the company as well, including President Jim Whitehurst, the former CEO of Red Hat, who also gets the importance of how going to market with a two-pronged direct and indirect approach beats direct only.

Only time will tell, but the early signs look positive. n

B A C K T A L K : Make something happen. Robert Faletra is Executive Chairman of The Channel Company. You can contact him via email at rfaletra@thechannelcompany.com.

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2021 EVENTS CALENDAR JANUARY

AUGUST

1/27

Best of Breed Virtual: Winter

8/15 - 17

XChange+ August JW Marriott • San Antonio, TX

FEBRUARY

2/10

SEPTEMBER

MES Digital Connections

9/19 - 21

Midsize Enterprise Summit+ Fall

MARCH

Gaylord Texan • Dallas, TX

3/8 - 11

XChange+ March

OCTOBER

Live + Virtual Events

10/11 - 12

APRIL

Best of Breed Conference Loews Atlanta • Atlanta, GA

4/21

Best of Breed Virtual: Spring 10/24 - 26 NexGen+

MAY

Anaheim, CA 5/3 - 6

Midsize Enterprise Summit+ Spring Live + Virtual Events

DECEMBER

12/6 - 7

Women of the Channel Leadership Summit EAST

JULY 7/21

MES Digital Connections

TBD

Women of the Channel Leadership Summit WEST Location Coming Soon

508.416.1175 | thechannelcompany.com

Hilton Midtown • New York, NY

For more information visit www.thechannelco.com/events

© 2021 The Channel Company, LLC. The Channel Company logo is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All other trademarks and trade names are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

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