The 10 Biggest IT Channel Chief Moves Of 2025
Fortinet, Snowflake, IBM, Lenovo, Red Hat and NetApp were among the vendors to see major channel chief moves in 2025.
Solution providers saw their fair share of influential channel chief departures, ascensions of loyal executives to the top channel role and recruitments of chiefs from rival firms in 2025 as vendors remake themselves for the artificial intelligence era and the growing need for cybersecurity expertise by solution providers.
Analyzing the various executive exits and entrances last year at some of the biggest IT companies in the world, CRN has broken down the biggest moves made among channel chiefs.
Most of the biggest moves were promotions from within the vendor, with Fortinet, Snowflake and IBM among the technology giants to trust a different employee with more power over their partner programs. Lenovo was one of the instances where a vendor added new blood to its channel leadership teams–taking top talent from computer maker rival Dell Technologies, no less.
Red Hat and NetApp were among the vendors to see their channel chiefs depart or move on to other roles.
[RELATED: 30 Notable IT Executive Moves: November 2025]
2025 Tech Executive Moves
In 2025, layoffs continued to be a reality for the technology sector as companies reallocate investments to faster-growth areas like AI and security–but Layoffs.fyi indicated that fewer companies and employees turned to job cuts compared to 2024.
As for the economy overall, it was a tougher one for hiring. U.S. unemployment increased to 4.2 percent by April and hit 4.6 percent in November, according to Forbes. That’s up from the mid-3 percent range seen in 2022. U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) contracted in the first quarter for the first time in three years. Consumer confidence fell to levels not seen since 2020.
In December, the U.S. added 50,000 jobs and the unemployment rate went down to 4.4 percent from 4.5 percent, according to CNN.
Be sure to check out CRN’s other year-end lists for 2025, including The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages of 2025 and The 10 Most Controversial Companies of 2025.
Read on for the biggest CEO changes in IT in 2025.
10. Stefanie Chiras
Red Hat
SVP, Partner Ecosystem Success
In October, Stefanie Chiras, the channel chief of three years for IBM’s enterprise-grade, open-source software division Red Hat, took on a new role.
Chiras now serves as a senior working with IBM and Massachusetts on an AI Hub that launched in December. Red Hat North America Ecosystem Vice President Kevin Kennedy succeed Chiras on an interim basis, finally becoming vice president of the global ecosystem in 2026.
Chiras took on the channel chief role in 2021 and led the partner organization through a flurry of new activity in virtualization as VMware customers looked for modern alternatives amid unpopular pricing changes. She also spearheaded a new modular program framework that spans multiple engagement motions, enabling partners to earn points for specific activities that better align with their business goals, regardless of how partners choose to work with Red Hat, among other accomplishments.
She worked at IBM for 17 years before joining Red Hat in 2018 as vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business unit. IBM closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2019.
Kennedy, her successor, has been with the company for about four years, according to his LinkedIn account. He takes the top channel job at Red Hat as the company and its parent, IBM, continue to integrate recent acquisitions HashiCorp and DataStax into their vast product portfolio spanning hybrid cloud, automation and AI. IBM is also in the middle of acquiringConfluent in a move that could open up more opportunities in the open-source enterprise data streaming space for Red Hat and its solution providers.
9. Landon Scott
Fortinet
VP, U.S. Channel Sales
In May, Fortinet promoted 10-year veteran Landon Scott to head up the company’s U.S. channel sales organization following the departure of Ken McCray from the channel chief role.
It was an up and down year for the cybersecurity vendor. Fortinet contended with a weaker-than-expected firewall refresh cycle, declines in the cloud-native application protection (CNAPP) platform gotten through the acquisition of Lacework last year–plus a host of exploited vulnerabilities.
But it also saw growth in its secure access service edge (SASE) portfolio plus product advancements such as the Secure AI Data Center end-to-end AI infrastructure security framework and provide real-time protection of large-scale graphics Processing unit (GPU) clusters and AI workloads.
Scott captains Fortinet’s partner organization as the vendor invests in its partner program, including the July reveal that its Fabric-Ready Technology Alliance Partner Program surpassed 3,000 integrations across more than 400 technology partners.
Scott joined Fortinet in 2015 as an area partner director and has been promoted several times, most recently being named vice president of channel operations in February 2023.
Prior to joining Fortinet, Scott had spent a decade at Juniper Networks, including in senior partner account manager and consulting engineer roles, according to his LinkedIn profile.
8. Amy Kodl
Snowflake
SVP, Channels, Alliances
Snowflake’s channel chief musical chairs saw multiple turns in 2025 as the vendor surpassed 12,600 total partners worldwide, about 30 percent growth year over year and a far cry from 600 partners the company had in 2022.
Tyler Prince left the role in May after two years, with Amy Kodl taking the top spot on an interim basis until the hiring of Chris Niederman in July. In a surprising twist, Niederman departed the Bozeman, Mont.-based data, AI and cloud products vendor in December, allowing Kodl to step back into chief position permanently.
As she settles into the role, Kodl has already proved her chops in partner leadership. She’s been with Snowflake for about two years now, joining the vendor in 2023 after 13 years with Salesforce, according to her LinkedIn account. She left Salesforce with the title of senior vice president of partner alliance management.
7. Jenni Flinders
NetApp
SVP, Partner, Channel
Another of the major channel chief departures of 2025 came just as the year closed out, with Jenni Flinders stepping down in December from her role of senior vice president of NetApp’s global partner organization after four years at the company.
Flinders’ departure also comes less than two months after she helped headline NetApp’s channel activities at the company’s NetApp Insight 2025 conference in Las Vegas. During her tenure as channel chief, she implemented specific guidance roles and the strategy and framework for co-selling to ensure that all customer segments and partner routes to market are addressed and executed on.
She established a tactical sales approach to effectively co-sell with partners, helping build an everyday co-selling mindset and muscle across NetApp sales teams. Her accomplishments also include spearheading efforts to use the channel to help businesses work with hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
Flinders joined NetApp as senior vice president for the company’s global channel partner business in July of 2021. Prior to joining NetApp, she spent nearly two-and-a-half years as vice president and global channel chief at VMware.
6. Kareem Yusuf
IBM
SVP, Ecosystem, Strategic Partners, Initiatives
IBM started 2025 with a new leader in its channel organization with 26-plus-year IBM veteran Kareem Yusuf ascending to the role of senior vice president of ecosystem, strategic partners and initiatives, in January.
In June, he gained more responsibilities and influence over the 114-year-old vendor’s partners with the departure of Kate Woolley, IBM’s channel chief and ecosystem general manager.
Under his watch, IBM expanded its partnership with Oracle, making IBM Watsonx Orchestrate AI agent offerings available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and making the IBM Granite family of AI models available through OCI Data Science, among other advancements.
IBM employees have also been hard at work integrating recent acquisitions HashiCorp and DataStax into the vendor’s vast product portfolio spanning mainframe, hybrid cloud and AI. The vendor is also in the middle of acquiring Confluent in a move that should boost the open-source enterprise data streaming capabilities of IBM and its solution providers.
One of Yusuf’s biggest goals ahead is getting closer to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s goal of 50 percent revenue coming from partners, not to mention helping the ecosystem navigate a growing AI business and a hardware refresh cycle among IBM customers.
5. Chris Bell
Sophos
SVP, Global Channels, Alliances, Corporate Development
Chris Bell joined Sophos through its February merger with Secureworks and assumed the position of channel chief of the 40-year-old security vendor.
Formerly Secureworks’ chief strategy officer, he now oversees Sophos’ 25,000-member partner ecosystem, even unveiling in July a refreshed channel program featuring an array of updates aimed at better rewarding partners for pursuing fast-growing cybersecurity opportunities with the vendor while introducing an array of updates to enhance flexibility.
Bell was with Secureworks for about nine years, previously serving as its vice president of strategy, corporate development and strategic alliances, according to his LinkedIn account.
He stuck with Secureworks after the company went public in 2016. Secureworks was previously part of Dell Technologies, where Bell worked on and off for about 10 years. His last title with Dell was director of business development for cloud client computing.
4. Wade McFarland
Lenovo
VP, North America Channels
Wade McFarland joined Lenovo in August, taking on the title of vice president of North America channels and coming aboard amid a strong PC refresh year for the company and its wide ecosystem of about 120,000 channel partners worldwide.
McFarland will likely have his work cut out for him as Lenovo and its partners continue to navigate Windows 11 migrations after Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 plus industry concerns in 2026 over shortages in memory storage, data processing units and hard disk drives.
Part of his responsibilities is leading the “One Lenovo” mission across all segments for its channel partners. Partners told CRN at the time of McFarland’s hiring that he could help take Lenovo’s data center and services business to another level.
The Beijing-based computer maker hired McFarland after he worked at Dell Technologies for about 24 years, according to his LinkedIn account. He left Dell with the title of vice president.
At Dell, he worked closely with tier two distributors as well as Dell’s channel partners to drive business outcomes for customers.
3. Brian Moats
Broadcom
SVP, Global Commercial Sales, Partners
Broadcom started 2025 with a new channel chief at the helm, making Brian Moats its senior vice president of global commercial sales and partners in January.
Moats started overseeing the chipmaker’s 35,000 partners at a time when partner program changes over the years have roiled partners and customers alike. In 2025, the channel saw Broadcom increase the cost of VMware for some customers by boosting the minimum purchase from 16 cores to 72 cores, in one example.
Moats himself authored the June 1 blog post that said Broadcom would cut partners in the lowest channel tier from reselling VMware products in an effort to slim down the partner base.
He has been with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based semiconductor vendor and parent of VMware for about seven years, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously served as Broadcom’s vice president of sales for global system integrators (GSIs).
He came to Broadcom through the 2018 acquisition of CA Technologies, where he worked for nine years. At the time of the acquisition, he was a global senior director of partner sales and go-to-market, leading a team of about 30 professionals focused on selling alongside DXC Technology.
2. Jeremiah Jenson
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
VP, North America Channel, Partner
Jeremiah Jenson returned to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in May to take on the role of vice president of the vendor’s North America channel and partner ecosystem.
Jenson came to the Houston-based IT products vendor after about seven years with Amazon Web Services, according to his LinkedIn account. He left AWS with the title of global leader of channel resell partners.
His return to HPE could prove a boost to how the vendor works with partners to sell AI, hybrid cloud and private cloud products and services, partners told CRN at the time. He also comes back to HPE as the company continues to integrate its portfolio with recent networking and cybersecurity acquisition Juniper Networks.
His previous tenure with HPE and its predecessor Hewlett-Packard ended in 2017 after more than 15 years. He left with the title of VP of Americas channel sales.
Among Jenson’s accomplishments during his HPE tenure were driving channel revenue share gains and leading the integration of HPE Aruba, Nimble and Simplivity into the HPE enterprise channel.
Jenson also revamped the deal registration process and made process changes that resulted in a 75 percent reduction in time to quote.
1. Tim Coogan
Cisco Systems
SVP, Global Partner Sales
In August, Cisco promoted Tim Coogan to the channel chief role, giving him the title of senior vice president of global partner sales and great influence over its 37,000-member partner ecosystem.
Coogan also oversees Splunk’s channel operations, with plans to merge the Splunk Partnerverse partner program into the Cisco 360 Partner Program sometime after that program’s scheduled launch on Feb. 1.
Splunk Channel Chief Gretchen O’Hara left the company in September, moving on to become Sage’s executive vice president of strategic partnerships and business development.
The 26-year Cisco veteran takes over the partner organization as the networking giant integrates with Splunk’s observability capabilities to deliver an improved portfolio for solution providers.
Coogan has worked at the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant for about 26 years, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously held the title of SVP of U.S. commercial business for about three years.