Channel Madness Round 1 Update: Defending Champ Rooney Trailing

With the first day of voting in the books for Round 1 of CRN Channel Madness, some chiefs are out to surprising leads.

We’re more than 24 hours into Round 1 voting in the 2021 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs, and a number of players have jumped out to strong leads.

The Cloud region is shaping up as one to watch, where 2020 Channel Madness Champion Kevin Rooney of Veeam is trying to defend his crown. He has some ground to make up though, as he’s currently trailing with 25 percent of the vote in his contest against Sandy Hogan of VMware, who has 75 percent.

Another battle to keep tabs on, the closest matchup so far, is Doug Yeum of Amazon Web Services against Eric Martorano of Nextiva. Yeum is currently ahead 54 percent to Martorano’s 46 percent.

Here’s a full look at the results so far:

Infrastructure

Shannon Sbar, Schneider Electric, 70 vs. Chris Lamborn, NetApp, 30

Oliver Tuszik, Cisco Systems, 57 vs. Christian Alvarez, Nutanix, 43

Rob Rae, Datto, 64 vs. George Hope, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, 36

Curtiz Gangi, Eaton, 63 vs. Steve Biondi, Lenovo, 37

Hardware

Kimberly King, Hitachi Vantara, 38 vs. Rob Cato, Lenovo, 62

Donna Grothjan, Aruba, an HPE company, 83 vs. Andy Zollo, StorageCraft Technology, 16

Jason Kimrey, Intel, 58 vs. Rola Dagher, Dell Technologies, 42

Scott Lannum, HP Inc., 28 vs. Scott Mann, Scale Computing 72

Cloud

Bob Lord, IBM, 22 vs. Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft, 78

Doug Yeum, Amazon Web Services, 54 vs. Eric Martorano, Nextiva, 46

Carolee Gearhart, Google Cloud, 78 vs. Jonathan McCormick, Intermedia, 22

Kevin Rooney, Veeam Software, 25 vs. Sandy Hogan, VMware, 75

Security

Kendra Krause, Sophos, 61 vs. Todd Meister, Zscaler, 39

Steve Pataky, Area 1 Security, 19 vs. Michelle Welch, WatchGuard Technologies, 81

Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies, 69 vs. Matthew Polly, CrowdStrike, 31

Karl Soderlund, Palo Alto Networks, 67 vs. Joe Sykora, Proofpoint, 33

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!