SonicWall, Lexmark Execs Share Channel Champ Honors

CRN has its first tie for Channel Champ Of The Month honors, and although we tried to break it, the CRN editorial cabinet's arguments on both sides were too compelling to force a runoff.

That's why this month we're honoring both Lief Koepsel, director of channel marketing at security vendor SonicWall, Sunnyvale, Calif., and John Linton, vice president for the solution provider channel at digital imaging vendor Lexmark, Lexington, Ky.

Also nominated were Liz Lawson, senior director of channels for Cisco's Customer Advocacy group, and Lance Liden, director of Business Partner sales for xSeries at IBM.

"My vote goes to John Linton," wrote Mark McKeever, COO of MicroAge, a Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider. "He's been quite visible at conferences and has taken the time to listen to our needs on several occasions. He has been responsive in followup to those meetings by assigning resources to attend to action items from these meetings, which is unfortunately too rare in my experience. Lexmark has developed a good array of profitability programs that hit at multiple levels."

For example, in August, Linton was instrumental in getting a multitiered program off the ground that emphasizes total printing solutions.

Laurie Benson, president of Inacom Information Systems, Madison, Wisc., said simply that Linton and Lexmark are true channel advocates.

On the flip side, Alvaka Networks President Oli Thordarson emerged as the biggest advocate for SonicWall's Koepsel. The Huntington Beach, Calif., solution provider is one of SonicWall's managed security service provider partners, a decision it undertook after numerous meetings.

"In those meetings, many things were discussed, and I must say that SonicWall stuck to their guns about making sure whatever programs were developed were fair and equitable for their channel partners as a whole," Thordarson said in an e-mail explaining his vote.

"They easily could have done deals to shortchange their channel partners in order to line their pockets with returns for short-term, self-interested actions. But time and time again, they would always stop to consider what impact a decision would have on the whole channel and then check to see if it measured up to their ethics of partner loyalty," Thordarson added. "[Koepsel's] willingness to plan with, work for and promote his partners has been unequaled in my experience, even by the most vocally channel-committed vendors."

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Valeh Nazemoff, director of business development for DataTech Enterprises, Fredericksburg, Va., said SonicWall is focused on making it easier for channel partners to do business with it.

"The major concern these days is what makes sense for the partners and which manufacturer has a better, easier, deployable, cost-effective and high-margin program," Nazemoff said. "It appears that SonicWall's TotalSecure has a very friendly and easy go-to-market program with fewer headaches involved than many other programs out there."

As far as last month's Channel Champ Of The Month, online voters differed from the editorial cabinet's choice. The cabinet picked Allison Watson, vice president of Microsoft's worldwide partner sales and marketing group. But 42.8 percent of online voters chose John DiLullo, vice president of worldwide distribution at Cisco Systems, who was responsible for opening up new distribution possibilities for the networking giant through a pact with D&H Distributing. Watson and Jim McDonnell, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Solution Partners Organization, split 28.6 percent of the vote.