Choose Your Chief: 2019 CRN Channel Madness Voting Is Now Open!

It starts with 32 of the industry's most prominent channel chiefs. It ends with one.

The 2019 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs has kicked off, pitting some of the channel's best-known executives against each other in head-to-head battles where CRN readers vote to determine the victors.

The winners of our fifth annual tournament will make their way, round by round, through the bracket, moving closer and closer to the championship match, where bragging rights are at stake. The losers? Better luck next year.

Some of last year's favorites are back for another run, like McAfee's Ken McCray, who won the whole shooting match last year and Check Point's Frank Rauch – who last year represented VMware – but there are also some new faces in the contest, such as IBM's John Teltsch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Paul Hunter and SonicWall's HoJin Kim.

Is it a popularity contest? A beauty contest? A vote for the executive that's advocated on your behalf or a vote against one who didn't step up when you needed help? It's up to you. The power of the vote is entirely in your hands.

One thing's for sure: It will all be a lot of fun.

Culled from CRN's 2019 Channel Chiefs list, CRN editors selected the 32 participants, representing a variety of vendors across the technology industry, from startups to stalwarts. Each represents one of four technology "regions:" Cloud, Hardware, Infrastructure and Security.

Voting for Round 1 is now open with 16 executive face-offs and will remain open until Wed., March 20 at noon ET. You can follow all the action at crn.com/madness and on social media with the hashtag #CRNChannelMadness And there's still time to enter our bracket contest to see if you can predict the winner.

Here's a look at the 2019 CRN Channel Madness tournament match-ups.

Infrastructure

Curtiz Gangi, Eaton vs. Jeff McCullough, NetApp

Shannon Sbar, APC by Schneider Electric vs. Brian Rosenberg, Juniper Networks

Gordon Mackintosh, Extreme Networks vs. Paul Hunter, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Oliver Tuszik, Cisco Systems vs. Rob Rae, Datto

Hardware

Joyce Mullen, Dell EMC vs. Nick Tidd, Plantronics/Polycom

Stephanie Dismore, HP Inc. vs. Raelyn Kritzer, Ruckus Networks, an ARRIS Company

Donna Grothjan, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company vs. Rob Cato, Lenovo

Jason Kimrey, Intel vs. Sammy Kinlaw, Lexmark

Cloud

Iain Urquhart, Oracle vs. Jenni Flinders, VMware

Carolee Gearhart, Google vs. Jonathan McCormick, Intermedia

Terry Wise, Amazon Web Services vs. Kevin Rooney, Veeam

John Teltsch, IBM vs. Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft

Security

Jason Stein, Kaspersky Lab vs. Ken McCray, McAfee

Chris Carter, FireEye vs. HoJin Kim, SonicWall

Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies vs. Jon Bove, Fortinet

Kendra Krause, Sophos vs. Torjus Gylstorff, Symantec

So, ladies and gentlemen, prepare to choose your chief.