Choose Your Chief: 2024 CRN Channel Madness Voting Is Now Open!

Voting is now open in CRN’s 10th annual Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs, which starts with 32 of the industry’s most prominent channel executives and ends with one champion.

player

SkVSaKAx

video

6348857906112

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

The 2024 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs kicked off on Thursday, March 14, pitting some of the channel’s most influential executives against each other in head-to-head battles where CRN readers vote to determine the victors.

Contestants in our 10th annual tournament will make their way, round by round, through the bracket, moving closer and closer to the championship match.

Scott Mann of Scale Computing, the 2022 and 2023 Channel Madness Champion, is back to defend his crown. Also returning to the tournament are fan favorites like 2023 semifinalists Christian Goffi of Nutanix and Tom Evans of Palo Alto Networks.

The field also includes former Channel Madness Champion Ken McCray, who won it all in 2018 when he was with McAfee but now represents Fortinet, as well as 2020 Champion Kevin Rooney of Veeam Software.

There are also several tournament newcomers, including Cynthia Loyd of Broadcom, Eric Torres of ScalePad and Michelle Ragusa-McBain of SonicWall.

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 who has 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.

Selected from CRN’s 2024 Channel Chiefs list, CRN editors picked the 32 participants, representing a variety of vendors across the technology industry. Each represents one of four “regions:” Transformation, Acceleration, Innovation and Evolution.

Voting for Round 1 begins with 16 executive face-offs and will remain open until Wednesday, 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 for a chance to win a new ThinkPad laptop provided by Lenovo.

Here’s a look at the 2024 CRN Channel Madness tournament matchups.

Transformation

Rob Cato, Lenovo vs. Ruba Borno, Amazon Web Services

Michelle Welch, WatchGuard Technologies vs. Kevin Ichhpurani, Google Cloud

Phil Soper, Hewlett Packard Enterprise vs. Michael Rogers, CrowdStrike

Kevin Rooney, Veeam Software vs. David Weeks, N-able

Acceleration

Ken Marks, SentinelOne vs. Rodney Clark, Cisco Systems

Michelle Ragusa-McBain, SonicWall vs. Kimberly King, Hitachi Vantara

Scott Mann, Scale Computing vs. Steve Loeb, Eaton

Stefanie Chiras, Red Hat vs. Eric Torres, ScalePad

Innovation