Channel Madness Tournament 2016 Bracketology Edition

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Welcome to a special Bracketology edition of CRNTV. Voting for Round 1 opens Thursday, March 17.

In the Infrastructure region, we have some new faces, with Cisco's Wendy Bahr, Nutanix's Chris Morgan and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Kerry Bailey and Scott Dunsire competing in the tournament for the first time.

This region also features Dell's Cheryl Cook and EMC's Gregg Ambulos, representing two companies that are in the process of merging. If both them advance far enough, we could see them face off against each other in the semifinal round.

The hardware region also has a number of tournament rookies, with five of the eight executives competing for the first time, including Eaton's Curtiz Gangi, APC by Schneider Electric's Rob McKernan and Ruckus Wireless' Sandra Glaser Cheek.

Two of those newbies, Lenovo's Sammy Kinlaw and HP Inc.'s Stephanie Dismore, will face each other in Round 1. Lenovo and HP are fierce rivals in the market so that's a battle we're eager to see play out in the voting.

Moving now to the Cloud region, where second-place finisher Adam Famularo of Verizon is going to give it another shot. He faces off in Round 1 against tournament newcomer Jessica Couto of Carbonite, a hot company that's making waves in the cloud storage market.

We also have another hot storage company, Datto, represented by Rob Rae in the tournament for the first time, going up against a tough competitor in Amazon Web Services' Terry Wise.

In our final group, the Software category, all eyes will be on 2015 tournament champion Mike Valentine of Sophos, who's promising a tough fight to any and all comers. He faces off against Channel Madness newcomer Bill Swales of Oracle in Round 1.

Valentine shares the field with several of Sophos' rivals, including Fortinet's Joe Sykora and Palo Alto Networks' Ron Myers. 2015 semifinalist Marc Dupaquier of IBM is also ready for a fight.