Choose Your Chief: 2022 CRN Channel Madness Voting Is Now Open!

Voting is now open in CRN’s eighth annual Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs, starting with 32 prominent channel executives and ending with one.

It starts with 32 of the industry’s most influential channel chiefs. It ends with one.

The 2022 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs kicked off on Thursday, March 17, pitting some of the channel’s most prominent executives against each other in head-to-head battles where CRN readers vote to determine the victors.

The winners of our eighth annual tournament will make their way, round by round, through the bracket, moving closer and closer to the championship match.

Many fan favorites are back for another run, like Schneider Electric’s Shannon Sbar, Veeam Software’s Kevin Rooney, the winner of the 2020 Channel Madness crown, and Check Point Software Technologies’ Frank Rauch, who made it into the final round last year. But there are also some new players to watch, including Nvidia’s Alvin Da Costa, Microsoft’s Rodney Clark and Amazon Web Services’ Ruba Borno.

Will you give your vote to an industry veteran who’s had your back? An up-and-comer who’s opening new doors? Will you cast a vote for the executive that’s advocated on your behalf or will you vote against someone 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 2022 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 opened on Thursday, March 17 with 16 executive face-offs and will remain open until Wed., March 23 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 for a chance to win a new ThinkBook PC provided by Lenovo.

While you’re voting, please consider joining The Channel Company in donating to the Red Cross to aid its humanitarian relief efforts in Ukraine.

Here’s a look at the 2022 CRN Channel Madness tournament match-ups:

Infrastructure

Rob Rae, Datto vs. Steve Loeb, Eaton

George Hope, Hewlett Packard Enterprise vs. Christian Goffi, Nutanix

Oliver Tuszik, Cisco Systems vs. Shannon Sbar, Schneider Electric

Rob Cato, Lenovo vs. Jeni Flinders, NetApp

Hardware

Kimberly King, Hitachi Vantara vs. Scott Mann, Scale Computing

Rola Dagher, Dell Technologies vs. Scott Lannum, HP Inc.

Donna Grothjan, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company vs. Alvin Da Costa, Nvidia

Richard Vaughn, Dynabook Americas vs. Jason Kimrey, Intel

Cloud

Jonathan McCormick, Intermedia vs. Kevin Rooney, Veeam Software

Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud vs. Rodney Clark, Microsoft

Bob Lord, IBM vs. Sandy Hogan, VMware

Ruba Borno, Amazon Web Services vs. Jeff McCullough, SolarWinds

Security

Michael Rogers, CrowdStrike vs. Michelle Welch, WatchGuard Technologies

Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies vs. Joe Sykora, Proofpoint

Lori Cornmesser, CyCognito vs. Karl Soderlund, Palo Alto Networks

Bob Skelley, Arctic Wolf vs. Kendra Krause, Sophos

So, Channel Madness fans, prepare to choose your chief!