2025 Channel Chiefs: Helping Partners Take AI From Opportunity To Reality
Solution providers face significant challenges incorporating AI into their product and service portfolios. Successful channel executives, recognizing the strategic role solution providers play in AI, are offering them the training, support and incentives they need to meet those challenges. Here are our 2025 Channel Chief honorees.
The AI revolution that began in 2023 continues to remake the IT industry in 2025, rapidly changing the products and services produced by IT companies and— equally important for the channel—remaking how those companies go to market with AI-infused offerings.
That includes how IT vendors work with their channel partners as solution providers, systems integrators and MSPs are challenged with helping businesses and organizations implement AI technology and use it to generate business value and competitive advantages.
And channel chiefs are a big part of that.
“The challenge that partners have is how do they go from opportunity to reality in AI,” Simon Ewington, worldwide channel and ecosystem leader at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said in an interview with CRN in May 2024. “That’s what we are trying to do and how we will differentiate ourselves in the market: helping partners on that journey to first understand where they are today in their AI journey, what are the skills that they have, where do they want to get to and then helping them to build a plan to get there.”
With the AI surge channel chiefs are taking a close look at their partner programs and making sure they are providing the training, support and incentives for partners to be successful.
“We are here for the success of our customers, and we do that through our investment in partners. We are supporting them in this AI journey,” said Rodney Clark, Cisco Systems senior vice president of partnerships and small and medium business, said in an interview with CRN in March.
“Any time you’re in a moment or a period like this where there is this rapid transformation and acceleration, which we all agree that AI is just that, we absolutely have to look at how we are incenting our partners,” Clark said. “Do we have the right journeys mapped out for our partners coming into our programs? Do we have the right specializations in place? And do we have the right investments in place to support the outcomes that we need?
As it does each year, CRN has assembled the CRN 2025 Channel Chiefs, a list of the pre-eminent channel executives in the IT industry. On CRN.com you can find the complete list of the CRN 2025 Channel Chiefs, along with their profiles, most recent channel achievements and even their personal channel philosophies.
We also provide channel chiefs’ answers to such questions as where they want their channel partners to invest this year and what they see as the biggest challenges for partners in 2025.
The 50 Most Influential Channel Chiefs of 2025 are an elite group drawn from the larger pool of channel chief honorees each year that represent the cream of the IT channel crop—leaders who drive the channel agenda and evangelize the importance of channel partnerships.
This year’s CRN Channel Chiefs list is especially important given the number of changes in top channel executive ranks at major IT companies in just the last year. Top channel executives appointed in 2024 include Tom Evans, chief partner officer at Cloudflare; Dave Guzzi, vice president of global partner scale at Intel; Michael Khoury, vice president of ecosystem partners at Palo Alto Networks; Tom Henderson, vice president, worldwide channels and alliances at Wiz; and Anthony Torsiello, senior vice president, worldwide partners and alliances at Zscaler.
Executive Editor, News, Steven Burke and Associate Managing Editor Gina Narcisi contributed to this article.