Channel Madness Round 1: Lead Change In Infrastructure As Other Matches Tighten Up
The CRN Channel Madness polls were busy over the weekend with several channel chiefs trying to mount comebacks.
We’re more than halfway through Round 1 voting in the 2021 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs, and some of the contests are getting heated.
Weekend voting brought with it a lead change in the Infrastructure region, where Nutanix’s Christian Alvarez pulled ahead with 54 percent of the vote in his matchup against Cisco’s Oliver Tuszik, who has 46 percent. Tuszik had been leading on Friday by 14 points.
Meanwhile, in the Security region, Zscaler’s Todd Meister has considerably narrowed the gap in his matchup with Kendra Krause of Sophos. Meister is trailing with 48 percent of the vote to Krause’s 52 percent. Krause had a 21-point lead on Friday.
And in the Hardware region where the Battle of the Scotts is underway—HP Inc.’s Scott Lannum vs. Scale Computing’s Scott Mann—Mann is working hard to maintain his lead. He’s at 62 percent of the vote to Lannum’s 38, but that’s after Lannum came on strong and picked up 10 points in weekend voting.
2020 CRN Channel Madness Champion Kevin Rooney of Veeam is also refusing to go quietly. He still trails with 39 percent to 61 percent for Veeam’s Sandy Hogan, but that represents a weekend gain of 14 points for Rooney.
Here’s a look at the full results so far:
Infrastructure
Shannon Sbar, Schneider Electric, 77 vs. Chris Lamborn, NetApp, 23
Oliver Tuszik, Cisco Systems, 46 vs. Christian Alvarez, Nutanix, 54
Rob Rae, Datto, 59 vs. George Hope, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, 41
Curtiz Gangi, Eaton, 69 vs. Steve Biondi, Lenovo, 31
Hardware
Kimberly King, Hitachi Vantara, 32 vs. Rob Cato, Lenovo, 68
Donna Grothjan, Aruba, an HPE company, 85 vs. Andy Zollo, StorageCraft Technology, 15
Jason Kimrey, Intel, 63 vs. Rola Dagher, Dell Technologies, 37
Scott Lannum, HP Inc., 38 vs. Scott Mann, Scale Computing 62
Cloud
Bob Lord, IBM, 25 vs. Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft, 75
Doug Yeum, Amazon Web Services, 53 vs. Eric Martorano, Nextiva, 47
Carolee Gearhart, Google Cloud, 80 vs. Jonathan McCormick, Intermedia, 20
Kevin Rooney, Veeam Software, 39 vs. Sandy Hogan, VMware, 61
Security
Kendra Krause, Sophos, 52 vs. Todd Meister, Zscaler, 48
Steve Pataky, Area 1 Security, 19 vs. Michelle Welch, WatchGuard Technologies, 81
Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies, 72 vs. Matthew Polly, CrowdStrike, 28
Karl Soderlund, Palo Alto Networks, 66 vs. Joe Sykora, Proofpoint, 34
Voting in Round 1 continues at CRN.com/madness until Wednesday, March 24 at noon ET, so there’s still plenty of time to cast your votes and choose your chief!