Channel Madness Round 2: Kinlaw Beating His Lenovo Successor; Defending Champ McCray Trails

The Solutions 16 are duking it out in Round 2 of the 2019 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs, where one channel chief is trying to hold back his successor and last year's champion has a big deficit to overcome.

The closest matchup of the round thus far is shaping up in the Hardware region between Rob Cato of Lenovo and Sammy Kinlaw of Lexmark. Kinlaw, a former channel chief at Lenovo who was succeeded by Cato, is currently leading 53 percent to 47 percent.

In the Security region, last year's champion, McAfee's Ken McCray, could be facing an upset by FireEye's Chris Carter, who so far is dominating the matchup with 75 percent of the vote to McCray's 25 percent.

In the Cloud region, tournament rookie Carolee Gearhart is outmaneuvering VMware's Jenni Flinders. Gearhart's up with 68 percent of the vote to Flinders' 32 percent.

And in the Infrastructure region, Datto's Rob Rae will have to orchestrate another come-from-behind win if he wants to take out Extreme Networks' Gordon Mackintosh. Mackintosh is ahead with 80 percent of the vote to Rae's 20 percent.

Here's a look at where all of the matchups stand:

Infrastructure

Jeff McCullough, NetApp 81 vs. Shannon Sbar, APC by Schneider Electric 19

Gordon Mackintosh, Extreme Networks, 80 vs. Rob Rae, Datto 20

Hardware

Joyce Mullen, Dell EMC 80 vs. Stephanie Dismore, HP Inc. 20

Rob Cato, Lenovo 47 vs. Sammy Kinlaw, Lexmark 53

Cloud

Jenni Flinders, VMware 32 vs. Carolee Gearhart, Google 68

Kevin Rooney, Veeam 81 vs. Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft 19

Security

Ken McCray, McAfee 25 vs. Chris Carter, FireEye 75

Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies 16 vs. Kendra Krause, Sophos 84

Voting in Round 2 of the CRN Channel Madness tournament remains open until noon ET on Tuesday, March 26. Visit CRN.com/madness to cast your votes and choose your chief!