Stepping Up To Help Partners

Never has leadership mattered more than now. With the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and social unrest wreaking havoc on the global economy, this year’s class of Most Influential executives rose to the occasion time and time again—from providing financial relief to partners to making big bold technology bets aimed at driving an economic recovery to making charitable contributions and speaking out on social issues.

With the coronavirus driving a massive shift to work-from-home, solution providers and vendor partners teamed up to meet the initial sudden surge for work-from-home technology purchases. Then channel partners—backed up by this year’s class of Most Influential executives—went into overdrive helping partners build digital transformation solutions for the new normal.

HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri committed $2 billion in financing for an HPE Financial Services payment relief program and increased liquidity for HPE partners with extended payment terms for HPE distributors. At the same time, Neri doubled down on his bold Everything-as-a-Service bet with a strategy aimed at moving HPE and its partners faster into the future with an unmatched consumption-based cloud experience for customers from the edge to the core to the cloud.

Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell stepped up with a whopping $9 billion in financing along with zero-percent interest rates for Dell Technologies server, storage and networking offerings with no up-front payment required. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, meanwhile, donated $100 million to help small businesses and others combat the global coronavirus pandemic as well as find treatments for COVID-19.

Cisco Systems’ popular Webex collaboration offering became a vital tool for companies moving to a work-from-home model, more than tripling in global volume in the wake of the pandemic. Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins, meanwhile, continued to drive Cisco’s software and subscription sales to new heights, while at the same time continuing to act as an advocate on pressing social issues.

Those CEOs—along with the rest of our Most Influential executives—offered solution providers much-needed partnership at a time when the channel needed it most. Here, then, are our 25 Most Influential Executives of 2020, in what has been an unprecedented time for partners and customers around the world.