Choose Your Chief: CRN Channel Madness Voting Opens Thursday

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

Thursday kicks off the first-ever CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs, 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 will make their way, round by round, through a bracket, moving closer and closer to the championship match, where bragging rights are at stake. The losers? Better luck next year.

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.

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

Culled from CRN's 2015 Most Influential 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 Software. Each vendor was limited to no more than two executives.

Voting for Round 1 opens on Thursday, March 19 at 10amET with 16 executive face-offs, and you can follow all the action on social media with the hashtag #CRNChannelMadness

Tomorrow we'll reveal the match-ups. For now, here's a list of the executives we've selected for CRN Channel Madness.

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

Infrastructure

Shannon Sbar, APC

Bruce Klein, Cisco

Edison Peres, Cisco

Herve Tardy, Eaton

Bob Gault, Extreme

Jim Ritchings, F5

Sue Barsamian, HP

George Hope, Simplivity

Hardware

Cheryl Cook, Dell

Frank Vitagliano, Dell

Gregg Ambulos, EMC

Jos Brenkel, HP

Maurits Tichelman, Intel

Thomas Stanley, NetApp

Ron Gill, Ruckus

Mike Valentine, Sophos

Cloud

Terry Wise, Amazon

Brooks McCorcle, AT&T

Justin Moore, Axcient

Craig Schlagbaum, Comcast

Craig West, NetSuite

Adam Famularo, Verizon

Frank Rauch, VMware

Dave O'Callaghan, VMware

Software

Tom Flink, Citrix

Steve Pataky, FireEye

Marc Dupaquier, IBM

Phil Sorgen, Microsoft

Jenni Flinders Microsoft

Ron Myers, Palo Alto

Mark Enzweiler, Red Hat

Kevin Gilroy, SAP

PUBLISHED MARCH 16, 2015