The 25 Most Influential Executives Of 2025
CRN breaks down the 25 Most Influential Executives of 2025 who are driving sales, transforming their business and paving the way for the future.
The most influential tech executives of 2025 have to pilot through a multitude of difficult challenges, both in IT and beyond.
These 25 tech leaders and CEOs are harnessing the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, doubling down on cybersecurity and navigating the issues posed by tariffs and supply chain disruptions.
This year’s Most Influential executive was HPE CEO Antonio Neri, who completed HPE’s historic $13.4 billion Juniper Networks acquisition while also staying true to the deeply held convictions that led to this defining moment for him and the company.
Other leaders who are shaping the world of IT include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, IBM’s Arvind Krishna and ServiceNow's Bill McDermott, to name a few.
CRN breaks down the 25 Most Influential Executives of 2025 who are driving sales, transforming their business and paving the way for the future, part of CRN’s Top 100 Executives of 2025.
25. Sean Kerins
President, CEO
Arrow Electronics
Kerins hasn’t slowed down in tackling any challenge that has come his way. Last year, he led the building of a command center focused on global supply chains, an investment paying off in the face of changing tariffs. Under his leadership, Arrow continues to expand its Asia-based Engineering Solutions Centers.
24. George Kurian
CEO
NetApp
Kurian pioneered the move by storage vendors to embrace the cloud. And while NetApp remains embedded with top hyperscalers via cloud-native versions of its products, he has turned the company into a top all-flash storage hardware provider while pushing its intelligent data infrastructure.
23. Lip-Bu Tan
CEO
Intel
Tan is leading Intel through a transformation unlike any the company has seen before, with a push for the semiconductor giant to double down on its CPU business, a revitalized effort to compete in the AI computing space and a move to make Intel more efficient by reducing management layers.
22. Joe Levy
CEO
Sophos
Levy has overseen major expansion moves for Sophos, including the recent $859 million acquisition of Secureworks. The acquisition has helped to enhance Sophos’ offerings in key categories such as XDR while also adding crucial new capabilities in areas such as SIEM.
21. Paul Bay
CEO
Ingram Micro
Bay is the driving force behind Ingram Micro’s transformation and resurgence as a public company. Under his leadership, the distributor has embraced innovation like its AI-powered Xvantage platform to shift from reactive to proactive sales and data-driven customer engagement.
20. Enrique Lores
President, CEO
HP Inc.
Lores has performed a massive transformation of HP Inc.’s supply chain, all while leading PC sales to a market-dominant position, driving the rollout of a massive AI PC portfolio, and debuting first-ever security capabilities for its printer lineup, hardening the devices against quantum computing attacks.
19. Sanjay Poonen
President, CEO
Cohesity
Poonen has turned a scrappy storage startup into one of the two largest data protection and management companies with his acquisition of Veritas’ data protection business. He also maintained a long-term focus on the future by delaying Cohesity’s planned IPO to concentrate on the acquisition.
18. Patrick Zammit
CEO
TD Synnex
Zammit has only been CEO for about a year, but he has proven to be a formidable force in managing shifting tariff policies. He has grown TD Synnex’s business while stamping his mark on the executive teams with a couple of key appointments, including Reyna Thompson as president of its North American business.
17. Lisa Su
Chair, CEO
AMD
After spending several years taking on Intel’s prized CPU business with continued success, Su is leading AMD on an even bigger battle against Nvidia in the AI computing market. With new, increasingly powerful GPUs scheduled for release every year, Su is making the chip designer a force to be reckoned with.
16. Jay Chaudhry
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Zscaler
In a massive expansion beyond Zscaler’s pioneering zero-trust security platform, Chaudhry and his team have been laying the groundwork for its next major chapter focused on security operations technology. Key moves have included a $675 million deal to acquire major MDR provider Red Canary.
15. Yuanqing Yang
Chairman, CEO
Lenovo
Yang is leading Lenovo to deliver on double-digit growth for its device, infrastructure and services business as the tech giant reaps the rewards of its hybrid AI strategy. He also is rounding out Lenovo’s data center and AI capabilities with the company’s plan to acquire enterprise storage vendor Infinidat.
14. Marc Benioff
Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO
Salesforce
The face of Salesforce—which has seen its ecosystem explode to about 16,000 partners—is AI’s firebrand for his takedowns of rival products and praise for his own Agentforce platform. Benioff also straddles the line between an AI apostle dazzled by its capabilities and a realist attuned to its dangers.
13. Tomer Weingarten
Co-Founder, CEO
SentinelOne
Weingarten has doubled down on fast-growing areas such as AI-powered security and analytics amid strong demand for products in its data business such as its AI SIEM offering. Other debuts included the launch of new agentic capabilities as part of the next version of its Purple AI security operations technology.
12. Thomas Kurian
CEO
Google Cloud
Kurian has shifted the $49 billion cloud giant toward innovation around AI accelerator hardware, software and partner services as Google Cloud jostles for a leadership position in the AI era. Big moves from Kurian include injecting Gemini into Workspace for free and launching new tensor processing units.
11. Bill McDermott
Chairman, CEO
ServiceNow
Companies talk about AI; McDermott is showing them how to do it. ServiceNow is leading the charge in making GenAI and agentic AI a key component across the company’s entire line of channel-first digital workplace applications. And it is offering free AI classes to everyone, including channel partners.
10. George Kurtz
Co-Founder, CEO
CrowdStrike
Under Kurtz’s leadership, CrowdStrike has gained strong momentum in categories beyond endpoint security, including cloud security, identity protection and Next-Gen SIEM. The company also has seen a spike in business related to its Falcon Flex subscription model, helping to drive consolidation on its platform.
9. Matt Garman
CEO
Amazon Web Services
Garman has elevated AWS to a record annual run rate of $117 billion as the world’s cloud market-share leader invests billions in AI innovation and data center expansion across the globe. He continues to lead AWS with a channel-centric strategy and a focus on agentic AI, new customer adoption and driving cloud services.
8. Rajiv Ramaswami
President, CEO
Nutanix
Ramaswami is transforming Nutanix into a platform provider where customers can run any application and manage their data regardless of where it resides. The company is adding over 600 net-new customers each quarter thanks in part to his strategy to win over concerned Broadcom-VMware customers.
7. Michael Dell
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Dell Technologies
Michael Dell is in the midst of his 41st year as the leader of the company, which is more dominant than ever, holding the market leadership position in high-end servers and storage arrays and enjoying a partnership with Nvidia that makes a compelling case for customers with AI ambitions.
6. Chuck Robbins
Chair, CEO
Cisco Systems
As the leader of the storied networking giant, Robbins’ most recent accomplishment was closing Cisco’s $28 billion Splunk megadeal and then immediately integrating Splunk’s security and observability technology into Cisco’s portfolios for the creation of a distinctive, AI-powered data platform.
5. Nikesh Arora
Chairman, CEO
Palo Alto Networks
Arora is driving the trailblazing platformization push at Palo Alto Networks even as it continues to enhance its offerings in key areas, including security operations, cloud security and SASE. Recent moves have included an expansion into advanced email security with the launch of Cortex XSIAM 3.0.
4. Satya Nadella
Chairman, CEO
Microsoft
The world is watching as Nadella copilots enterprises and partners further into the AI era, navigating not only eye-popping infrastructure costs to meet demand but complex business relationships with companies such as OpenAI—all while enabling partners to be on the front lines of business transformation.
3. Arvind Krishna
Chairman, CEO
IBM
IBM’s captain is steering this 114-year-old ship, its mighty consulting division and its ecosystem through AI advancement in some of the most complex customer IT environments, a mainframe refresh cycle and a series of inspired acquisitions that can take the tech giant and partners deeper with clients.
2. Jensen Huang
Founder, President, CEO
Nvidia
Huang continues to keep Nvidia ahead of the AI computing curve with a slate of new GPU-powered platforms that he says will satiate the increasingly high-performance needs of reasoning models and agentic AI workloads. He is also forging new opportunities for partners with robotics and sovereign AI.
1. Antonio Neri
President, CEO
HPE
Neri knew that as he battled to complete HPE’s historic $13.4 billion Juniper Networks acquisition, it was important to stay true to the deeply held convictions that had led to this defining moment for him and the company.
“Despite all the challenges you find out there and a lot of adversity that sometimes comes your way, the important thing is to stay true to your principles and values,” said Neri. “That’s what has guided me throughout my career and definitely as a CEO. Look, I’m really proud of what we have done. I’m very excited for what comes next in this new chapter of HPE.”
That new chapter officially began after a settlement of the DOJ lawsuit cleared the way for the completion of the deal on July 2, two years and five months after Neri first contacted Juniper CEO Rami Rahim about the possibility of an acquisition by HPE.
Neri’s vision, conviction and determination to see the deal through has earned him the spot as the No. 1 Most Influential executive on CRN’s Top 100 Executives list for 2025.