The Most Powerful Women Of The Channel 2019: Power 100

The Power 100 is culled from the ranks of CRN's Women of the Channel and spotlights the female executives whose insight and influence help drive channel success.

The 2019 Power 100

This year, CRN honors nearly 700 women whose channel expertise and vision are deserving of recognition in its annual Women Of The Channel showcase.

Of those, an exceptional 100 executives were chosen by the CRN editorial staff to represent its Power 100 list. These women are leading their organizations from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. As part of the application process, these women had to answer many different questions about how they're driving partner profits:

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year?

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year?

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019?

Here are the 100 women that made the Power 100 list. We are proud to honor their achievements.

By Company:

A-E | F-K | L-O | P-S | T-Z

Kelly Hartman

Global Head of AWS Partner Network

Amazon Web Services

AWS sees unprecedented opportunity for APN partners to help customers achieve their digital transformation objectives. To help them seize the opportunity, Hartman and her team introduced changes to the APN Program, resulting in channel business growth.

Years In Position: 4.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the past year, APN has seen accelerated growth, driven by strong customer demand for more agile IT operating models, and data and analytics-driven innovation. These areas are increasing mass migrations to AWS, including more Data Center shutdowns, and rapid adoption of Machine Learning services and features. We expanded our programs and introduced new options to help partners take advantage of all of the cloud-driven customer opportunity. Since 2016, we've added over 35,000 partners, with more than 60% headquartered outside of North America. Our rapid growth and customer expectations for deeply skilled partners (in terms of both AWS Certifications and specialized knowledge) drove changes to our foundational APN Program. We introduced new requirements and benefits, and renamed our Standard Tier to Select. To help partners differentiate, we added new categories within the AWS Competency Program in the areas of Machine Learning, Cloud Management Tools, Industrial Software, Containers, and Nonprofit in the Public Sector space. We've also expanded our Service Delivery program with new designations related to Windows Workloads on AWS, and IoT. To help partners build specialized practices, we launched the AWS Navigate Program. These investments resulted in strong partner adoption and growth of our channel business.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our goals for this year center on program adoption, helping partners meet new APN Program criteria, and developing new benefits for APN Partners who deliver positive outcomes for customers. We will expand ACE and AWS Navigate, and will invest in the next generation of APN Partners from startups, to born-in-the cloud partners, to those partners who are transforming their businesses to take advantage of the innovation coming from the AWS Cloud.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? We are seeing demand from customers for APN Partners' software solutions and APN Consulting Partners who can deliver cloud strategy and planning, build new solutions, migrate workloads, and provide full lifecycle capabilities (Next Gen MSPs). AWS customers are looking for Partners for many different use cases, and it is constantly evolving (e.g. Machine Learning, IoT, AR/VR, Data & Analytics, Industrial Software, Healthcare, Blockchain). As a starting point, APN Partners should have DevOps skillsets and methodologies, should have AWS trained, certified, and accredited individuals, and they should take advantage of our APN Programs to help build, market, and sell their solutions.

Darci Kleindl

GM, North America Partner Sales

Amazon Web Services

In 2018, Kleindl helped SWS to exceed 100 percent year-overyear partner revenue growth as an essential contributor to the commercial business. She built new mechanisms to intentionally embedded partners into each facet of the business for mutual success.

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 6

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? During 2018, we (I) focused on three initiatives for mutual AWS and partner success: 1) Recruit and Develop High Potential Partners 2) Acceleration of ISVs and 3) Hire and Develop talent. To recruit and develop high potential partners, we drove the consolidation and alignment of partner development assets into a centralized organization and accelerated our partner's time to value. Additionally, we excelled with CEO sponsored multi-year collaboration agreements and built advanced AWS practices. We had substantial headcount growth and concentrated our efforts on organizational capacity through role delineation. This allowed us to surpass our hiring goals due to intentional alignment of the right talent for the right role and cultivated the diversity of our team. Additionally, we applauded our people for purposeful customer obsession, a core Amazon leadership principle, and the reason we exist. Lastly, to accelerate our customer impact with ISVs, we led an initiative to develop and scale to new market segments. We bridged our AWS marketplace and our direct sales motion to create uniformity for our partners and customers. In a few months, we exceeded our partner and customer migration goals and our organization became the trusted advisers for ISVs and our commercial sales teams.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our main goal is to evolve our partner business model to result in accelerated growth for our partners. Therefore, two core focus areas are on new business solution offerings and the consumption of our valued sales and technical readiness to create new business opportunities and empowerment within our channel. With each passing day, change occurs (acquisitions, new competition, new services) therefore, we goal ourselves and hold ourselves accountable to our ability to help our partners grow their business ahead of the changes. We live in a "you win, I win, we all win" mentality and value our partner community.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success is the ability to Earn Trust. At all levels of our customer's organizations, they are looking for partners who they can trust with their business technology decisions. This includes the ability to operate with high integrity in every situation, be vulnerable when necessary, and balance short term and long term outcomes. Additionally, customers want empowerment, therefore, partners need to "bring the customer along the learning journey" and ensure customers have the internal skills needed for success. Finally, employing mechanisms for open communication with our field sellers to ensure the best customer outcomes.

Katie Boeh

Director, Channel Marketing, Communications

APC by Schneider Electric

Boeh launched a game-changing offer in the Software and Digital Services category and relaunched the Opportunity Registration Program with a simplified approach and fewer restrictions.

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 7

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? My focus is on enabling our partners through marketing/communications, incentive programs, and education -- all of which is an ongoing process which never stops. We never stop trying to improve our programs, offers and support to give our partners the best possible competitive advantage so they can differentiate themselves to their customers. Here is how I would describe my involvement in these two accomplishments: Re-launching our Opportunity Registration Program: My team owns the APC Channel Partner Program, of which deal registration is a critical component. In 2018, my team and I worked collaboratively with our stakeholders to drastically revise and re-launch the program making it simpler, more profitable, and more in line with the market demands and needs of our partners. Launching a new game-changing offer in the Software & Digital Services category: We had a lot of focus in the second half of 2018 on awareness, promotion, and education around EcoStruxure IT for Partners -- our new cloud-based software-as-a-service offer created specifically for the channel. This education and promotion will continue to gain momentum and evolve going into 2019, and will include marketing support for partners who want to promote this new offer to their customers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goal is to help our channel partners to be profitable. I'd like to help them increase their customer loyalty and recurring revenue opportunities with us. I hope to do that by educating and incentivizing them around our new Software and Digital Services offers, and around the Edge. I want solution providers to see APC as a vital partner in their evolving assessment and services business -- not just as a hardware provider. We will launch a new certification and benefits to achieve this goal as part of a comprehensive education strategy we will execute with our channel sales organization.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Maintaining relevance and providing value to their customers. They can achieve that with APC by learning to monetize the management of what I call the "Edge Lifecycle." Partners need to stay "sticky" with their customers beyond the installation of physical infrastructure by deploying a monitoring, management, and/or assessment practice to stay engaged with their customers beyond the original sale of hardware. This gives them a recurring source of revenue and gives them access to real-time data which can not only fix problems as they arise, but ultimately enable them to predict and prevent failures based on machine learning and benchmarking.

Shannon Sbar

VP, Channels, North America

APC by Schneider Electric

Sbar doubled sales coverage and support in the field for channel partners. She also relaunched the Opportunity Registration Program with bigger discounts, fewer restrictions, and an enhanced digital experience for partners.

Years In Position: 10

Years In Channel: 22

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I worked collaboratively with my fellow leaders to create a strategy which called for a new project-based sales organization to be created to work alongside our existing channel sales organization. The goal was to provide more resources, as well as strategic and dedicated support to our network of channel partners across the country, and it's working extremely well. A big part of my job is meeting with our most strategic partners and hearing their feedback and ideas regarding our products, programs, and how we do business together. We turned that feedback into very deliberate action last year with our re-launch of the Opportunity Registration Program -- simplifying, removing restrictions, and improving the digital process. All of the improvements were based on direct partner feedback, and as we continue to hear those voices from our partner community, we will continue to evolve and improve our programs. I created a new position on my leadership team in 2018 specifically dedicated to Channel Digital Services and bringing our software and digital services offers to the channel. He is dedicated to enabling the channel to be profitable selling these new offers as a means of generating new sources of reliable, recurring revenue streams.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goal is the same as always -- growth! Specifically, we want to see our partners continue to grow their recurring revenue with us by selling connected, integrated solutions with a lifecycle strategy -- not just a one-and-done buy/resell approach. We want our channel to continue to expand their business with us by not just selling batteries and UPSs, but by selling a full solution which includes physical security, as well as a robust digital monitoring software & service component.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Partners serve as our customers' trusted advisors, so solving their problems is our common goal. To do this successfully, we (partners, distributors and vendors) all must be prepared: listen to our customer needs, know the solution we are proposing, know our differentiators vs the competition, make a proposal that offers value to the customers, guarantee a correct implementation and the best use of our solutions, and we must keep a winning relationship with them. So, in order to be successful, we must keep the focus in continuous improvements in all we do.

Leslie Vitrano Hubright

Director, Europe Channel Marketing, Partner Programs

APC by Schneider Electric

APC invested in a new channel marketing organization for European partners under Vitrano Hubright’s leadership, transforming co-marketing and demand generation.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 5

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? As a new team, we leveraged partner feedback to assess the best approach to increase our partners' business and experience. Therefore, we confirmed that adjustments to co-marketing and partner programs needed to be our focus. We targeted our efforts specifically on the trend of Edge Computing. Aligned with the launch of our new industry-leading data center infrastructure management software for partners -- EcoStruxure IT, we developed a holistic program, including co-marketing campaigns, tools, incentives, trainings and profitability programs. Aligned with the multitier Edge Certification, we spearheaded a project with several global and local teams to customize our deal registration program, which increased discounts and had zero minimum revenue requirements. Additionally, we increased eligible marketing funds and campaigns to drive leads and demand. Lastly, my team drove a launch strategy that gave exclusive access to top tier partners for the offer, programs and benefits prior to the launch. As a result, the channels' systems and software results outpaced our overall business growth. Deal Registration increased +30%. The Edge Certification became the second largest certification in our Europe Partner Program. Lastly, our partner satisfaction increased notably by the end of 2018. These efforts and results speak to APC's channel-centric cultural and mission.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? APC by Schneider Electric is going continue to focus on enabling channel growth with services and solutions from digital transformation trends such as IOT, Edge Computing and Security. The IT Channel will continue to be our primary and preferred route-to-market. Therefore, we will focus on creating the right tools, solutions, campaigns and programs that help increase our partners' profitability, support, enablement and overall experience.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The Europe market is continuing to see positive growth as services and software transform the value channel partners provide to their endusers. Trends, such as IOT and Edge Computing, are making their way deeper into the Europe market and creating an exciting wave for IT companies to expand across all categories, including services, software and hardware. But, of course, the key success and differentiation for IT partners in 2019 will be monetizing software and services that provide visibility and analytics for on and off prem infrastructure that enables their customers' digital transformations.

Lisa Braun

Director, Sales

Arrow Electronics

In Braun’s prior role and in her new role as director of sales, she has been able to win numerous new lines of business. She has also worked very hard to enhance IoT offerings at Arrow and position the distributor to be the go-to partner for IoT.

Years In Position: 0.5

Years In Channel: 23

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Lisa's partner was having trouble managing usage, overages/SaaS business. Lisa spent the last year working with them to onboard to Arrow's cloud marketing portal. This will be a huge savings for Lisa's partner from a resource perspective and ease of doing business to manage a complex business problem.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Certainly to grow faster than the market is always a top priority. Selling solutions, building a solid cloud strategy and growing our professional services business across our partner community are key for me in 2019.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Growing their professional services business and encourage our partners to sell a broader portfolio and selling solutions.

Tamara Ells

Sr. Director, GM, Infrastructure

Arrow Electronics

Ells created new enablement tracks to assist partners in positioning multi-cloud platforms, with a focus on solution-based marketing and selling options to help net-new logo acquisition. Over 60 percent of partners showed increased revenue.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? This past year has been about finding ways to build profitability in a rapidly changing market. The storage solutions and infrastructure teams that I lead have had to redefine themselves to stay relevant and provide value in new ways. One of the most important changes was in building a more responsive sales and support structure for my business unit, emphasizing flexibility in finding ways to close deals, creative marketing and enablement activity to drive targeted OEM initiatives, and developing a deeper understanding of the end customer buying process to help our partners successfully target opportunities. By focusing on programs that allowed customized service, engineering and marketing support, we helped partners of varying size and expertise in the storage arena grow profitably. Additionally. integrating flexible financial solutions through Arrow Capital helped to navigate multi-cloud environments, and provided true consumption options for on-prem solutions.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? For 2019, I first look to successfully integrate Arrow's broader technology expertise into our channel partner business, opening new solutions plays and driving incremental growth and service revenue for Arrow and our partners. Additionally, I want to continue to develop the programs my team has initiated that support partners at varying stages of their digital transformation pivot profitably to recurring revenue streams, leveraging the enablement capabilities and financial strengths that Arrow provides.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Key in 2019 is an ability to understand the evolving end user buying process; balancing current revenue streams with an increasing recurring revenue and service focus. Establishing differentiated value continues to be a challenge â€“ leveraging resources from suppliers and distributers to help bridge gaps in training and support of emerging solution plays remains an important part of profitably navigating the market.

Donna Grothjan

VP, Worldwide Channels

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company

Security is top of mind today, so Aruba continues to deliver new network security innovations. Grothjan oversaw the development of comprehensive support programs for Aruba’s partners in this critical area.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 29

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? From large enterprises to mid-market organizations and small business, all of our customers are focused on security. Today's increasingly sophisticated attacks and vanishing IT perimeters require new approaches and new solutions for protecting data and other high value assets and this presents a huge opportunity for partners. So, a key goal for the last 12 months was expanding our security business. In addition to introducing new security solutions, we launched a new worldwide security partner program. Focused around our industry-leading ClearPass and IntroSpect solutions, this program includes new training and competencies and new incentives for security-focused partners. Another way I helped advance our channel business was expanding our SMB strategy with a new partner co-sell model in the mid-market. A key enabler for growth, the strategy focuses on leveraging the right inside sales and partner coverage model and ensuring we have ongoing demand generation, lead management and partner enablement to drive overall growth. I am responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of each of these strategies and programs and I am very lucky to work with one of the best channel teams in the industry!

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? First and foremost, we'll continue to be a channel-focused company. Our key goal is to enable our partners to realize their maximum opportunities, whether that's helping them optimize their business models, invest in new areas of TAM or further support their services businesses. In addition, we'll continue to increase the number of partners that hold competencies in the components of our Mobile First Platform so they can help their customers with their digital transformations. We want to help our partners 'see beyond infrastructure' and identify and pursue new revenue streams that will ultimately expand their businesses.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In today's experience economy, an increasing amount of business value is being driven by software. Many partners will develop skills and practices in managed services, analytics, cybersecurity, application development and professional services, while for others, partnering with other solution providers makes sense. A firm focused on application development may partner with a cloud and managed security services partner to create a complete digital experience for a customer, for instance. Partners will need to find the combination that makes the most sense for their business, but make sure they can address these five areas of growth and opportunity.

Anne Chow

President, National Business, AT&T Business

AT&T

Chow has overseen enhancements to the AT&T Alliance Channel, including more compensation options and support and access to AT&T accounts. In Partner Exchange, new products and tools enable solution providers to have robust product conversations.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 12

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I continue to lead an organization that supports thousands of indirect sellers, including solution providers and independent sales contractors in our AT&T Partner Solutions organization and 1,600 DIRECTV dealers. When we brought Partner Exchange and Alliance Channel under the Partner Solutions umbrella a year ago, we did with the intent to invest more resources into our channel programs. This began by bringing together the best resources from our indirect channels, so solution providers from all indirect channels could have access to our best of breed solutions. Major enhancements were introduced to the AT&T Alliance Channel, including more compensation options, support and access to AT&T accounts. In our Partner Exchange program, new products and tools were launched allowing solution providers to extend their product conversation with their customers. We also made it even easier for them to do business with more products available via APIs. The DIRECTV for Business dealer channel drove growth: Enhanced Dealer/Distributor focus in 2018 led to 117% Y/Y growth; Strategic dealers grew 24% Y/Y; and through a successful partnership with National Accounts, the ACE-Dealer Alignment had 39% Y/Y growth. We also continued to strengthen and grow our dealer partnerships through industry leading councils and numerous growth initiatives.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Expand and optimize our channels. We'll do this by continuing to add more qualified partners. And for our existing partners, we'll continue to assess, create, and provide them with the tools and support needed to help them grow revenue and capture additional net new accounts. It's all about growth!

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In 2019, AT&T Partner Solutions plans to continue our commitment & investment into our indirect channel programs. 2018 was a tremendous year of growth -- this is a testament to the success of our solution providers. To continue success in 2019, there are key areas for solution providers to consider, with key emerging technology trends -- tremendous IoT momentum, growth in cybersecurity, and of course there is 5G. Look into these technologies now, if you haven't already to learn how they can fit into business models. Also, look for opportunities to diversity product portfolios, wireline could explore mobile & vice versa.

Alicia Dietsch

Alicia Dietsch VP, National Business Marketing

AT&T

Dietsch’s channel team executed on the vision of enhancing the enablement of AT&T’s solution providers. Actions included expanding access to the majority of AT&T Business accounts and scaling integrated solutions for partners

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 2

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In 2018, my team executed on our vision to transform our distribution strategy and doubled down on our commitment to the Alliance Channel. Our plan started with key pilot programs and initiatives to gain insights and feedback from critical solution providers in our advisory council. We accelerated investments to optimize channel improvements starting in January. My channel marketing team delivered on our investments to transform the program and realized significant growth across the channel. Some examples are as follows: Expanded access to nearly all AT&T Business accounts. This includes our vertical customers that have typically been AT&T only accounts. Aligned compensation to allow comprehensive partnerships with our direct sellers to maximize distribution and coverage Developed APIs to optimize the ability for solution providers to qualify, price, propose, and contract solutions such as AT&T Dedicated Internet. Launched new products/offers with SD WAN, security, and OTT voiceScaled back office support resources dedicated to our "feet on the street"" program. Invested in programs and sponsorships for top master agents.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our goal is to drive 40% growth with the channel in 2019. We will achieve this by continuing our transformation of our distribution strategy with solution providers. We will continue to leverage the investments we have made to support and enable our solution providers via developing solutions and streamlining processes to enhance the experience for both our customers and our solution providers.

Jennifer Griesinger

Director, Technology, AT&T Partner Solutions

AT&T

Griesinger led the creation of the technology road map and strategy for the channel and took the team from a startup to a fully operational and sustainable model as it built partnerships and defined the platform.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 2

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? The technology team was able to deliver over 200+ enhancements in 2018. These included improvements and new functionality on the portal experience, enhancements to existing and new API's, as well as internal operations automation, all which improved the overall experience for our Solution Providers. We continued to execute on the Direct Consumption API roadmap for APEX and began to mirror the API functionality across the Alliance Channel in order to better enable the Master Agents. Additionally, I lead the creation and implementation of a new operating model for the APS Technology Team to ensure we were finding synergies across all 3 channels, developing reusable technology solutions and creating an improved user experience for all of our Solution Providers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? We'll continue to focus on our solution providers and the needs that drive their businesses. As an innovative, forward-thinking channel program, we pride ourselves on continuing to deliver the products and tools they need to be successful. We're constantly evolving to take advantage of the growing technology trends, and we have exciting things planned with fiber, cybersecurity, IoT and the rollout of 5G. In addition, we'll enhance our enablement and support to ensure our partners can provide the right solutions, faster. This year and beyond will bring tremendous opportunity for growth and innovation in the indirect channel.

Lindsey Westbrook

Director, Field, Channel Marketing, Americas

Barracuda Networks

Westbrook focused on internal enablement, educating team members and empowering them to advance. She also built out the team to support a narrower focus on key strategic partners that can take Barracuda to the next level.

Years In Position: 7

Years In Channel: 10

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I have spent quite a bit of time with our finance department over the past year, taking a deep dive into our channel team's budget and learning how to allocate it more effectively to support new programs that will help grow and develop our partner community. This work will have a huge impact on the types of activities we will be able to deliver to further partner education and reinforce our commitment to our partners' success. Additionally, I have been focusing my efforts on our sales and our partner teams on a personal level. Building stronger relationships and gaining a better understanding of their needs helps us develop enhanced programs to complement our joint growth objectives.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goals are to increase the depth of engagement, accountability, and commitment of our partner base. We intend to offer more dynamic programs that will dramatically increase our sales alignment, ultimately resulting in a significant growth of partner-driven opportunities.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for our partners is the ability to execute on joint strategies in alignment with our key focus areas. That means leveraging the programs and resources we provide and taking advantage of our increased coverage and field alignment model.

Carolyn Crandall

CMO

Attivo Networks

Crandall built programs to drive channel partner sales and momentum. She developed the framework for the Attivo channel program, partner profitability models and joint marketing programs and built out the integration partner program.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 30

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Having a strong channel background, I have been a key advocate for a channel-centric go-to-market sales strategy. Additionally, I have built a partner program that is designed to reward our partners for their efforts and to enable them to sell beyond their initial first deal. I actively work to provide resources and support for our partners so they can grow their business, increase their education, and see benefits from selling deception as a force multiplier to their existing security solutions. I have also advocated for the development of additional feature enhancements so that partners can offer deception managed services.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Attivo is a dedicated channel-centric company and our goal is to grow our partner base in proportion to market demand and for maximized partner profitability. As we are still an emerging technology, our partner goals are based upon building a value-added partner base that can learn from initial joint selling and use this education to create new opportunities that they are able to drive. Our goals include working closely with our strategic partners on business alignment and how we mutually create market demand and sales so that they can hit revenue targets and optimal profitability.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Simply put, evolve or die. In so many ways, technology is commoditizing and those that cannot evolve to value-based models will struggle to survive. Attivo channel partners will thrive and gain new business opportunities by working with customers on new security risk models that are built on strategies for the advanced adversaries, a perimeterless world of cloud and an all things Internet connected world. This change presents new opportunities but requires a different strategy, and as such, different technologies. The key to success is to reject status quo and appreciate that disruptive innovation may not come from the largest vendors.

May Mitchell

VP, Global Field, Partner Marketing

BlackBerry Cylance

As of February 2019, BlackBerry completed its acquisition of Cylance. As Mitchell looks forward, her goals for partners are centered around enablement and demand generation to drive growth in new product offerings (AI platform) and services sales

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I have a unique background of understanding full end-to-end GTM. I came from the sales and channel sales background before moving into a marketing role. I am able to help the teams (product, marketing, sales, channel) gain alignment and focus on a few things important for partners. The Global Field Marketing team plays an instrumental role in the GTM process by socializing the plans with key partners in region, planning and making the programs come to life in the regions. The Global Field Marketing teams are focused on quarterly objectives and are disciplined in their operating model that delivers a simple, consistent partnering sales motion. We also have the rigor to follow up and measure on our results. We continue to invest in our partners who share a common vision, engaged and contribute to mutual growth.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? As of February 21, 2019, BlackBerry completed that acquisition of Cylance. The combined company is now a billion-dollar cybersecurity firm with the technology portfolio enterprises need to intelligently connect, protect and help build secure endpoints. As we look forward to our new fiscal year beginning May 2019, our goals for our partners are centered around enablement and demand generation to drive growth in new product offerings (AI platform) and services sales. We will continue the cadence of communicating and planning with partners to ensure they are leveraging Cylance content to propel their business growth.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? As the world's largest AI security vendor, channel partners can tap into a $11 billion addressable market, Endpoint Protection for businesses and consumers. Cylance Partners have successfully contributed to our growth in migrating over 3,400 customers who believe that prevention is possible. Partners have shared growth in reselling solutions with their value-add services such as risk assessments, compromise assessments, planning, deployments and ongoing state of health services. The key to success for channel partners is to leverage the Cylance knowledge experts and content to educate your customers about the business benefits on what predictive advantage means for their business.

Cortney Steiner

VP, Sales

Carahsoft Technology

In 2018, Steiner’s team provided excellent service to over 260 unique reseller partners and provided proactive sales and marketing support for over 35 vendor partners. Product specialists delivered over 5,000 hours of complimentary training/ enablement to 6,000 end users.

Years In Position: 8

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Under Cortney's leadership, Carahsoft's 100+-person Adobe-CEGIS team, processed more than 27,000 orders in 2018 and through proactive sales and marketing campaigns generated more than 4,000 new sales opportunities to its channel partners in 2018. Key to Cortney's success is the constant innovation across sales, marketing and customer support initiatives to ensure customer success with the software purchased through Carahsoft and the channel. These high-volume, value-add activities have encompassed the development and implementation of a dedicated nurture team, leverage of 1-800 number for customer sales and service, 24x7 support, online tech support, daily demo program, help desk team (more 1,400 support tickets logged in 2018), 70+ videos on YouTube channel for customers and partners, demo specialist team (conducted 1,504 demos in 2018), and more than 5,000 hours of post sales enablement/training delivered to end users at no charge. This is in addition to hundreds of custom built "welcome kits" to provide customers with personal outreach to ensure successful installation of products and solutions. This service is available to all channel partners to leverage and is 100% complimentary. Cortney truly sees every opportunity as a chance to add value and support to Carahsoft's customers and partner ecosystem.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Cortney's #1 goal is to continue to grow and add value to her customers in the entire channel by leveraging the strengths of every partner and working with them to expand their business and enter new markets with Carahsoft's support and resources.

Christine Bufalini

Sr. Director, Field, Channel Marketing

Carbon Black

Bufalini is managing the Americas Channel marketing budget to line up partners with strategic and targeted campaigns in 2019. Partners play a very important role and investing in the channel is paramount to Carbon Black’s success.

Years In Position: 0.5

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Managing the Americas Channel marketing budget to line up with partners with strategic and targeted campaigns in 2019. Partners play a very important role and investing in the channel is paramount to Carbon Black's success.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? To grow partner contribution to both sales and marketing. Leveraging the partner ecosystem to build on the success they have already achieved with their existing customers as well as help introduce new customers to the Predictive Security Cloud platform.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Leverage Carbon Black's new, free of charge, sales and technical training that will allow partners to build product expertise, gain security specialization & demonstrate Carbon Black's proven customer value. This is the first year Carbon Black is providing partners with access to the same training as their internal teams.

Lisa Miller

President, Wholesale, Indirect, Small, Medium Enterprise, Alliances

CenturyLink

Miller integrated former CenturyLink and Level 3 contracts to create a new, competitive Partner Program Agreement to help CenturyLink be well positioned to grow and strengthen its position in the channel.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 8

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Integrated former CenturyLink and Level 3 contracts to create a new, competitive Partner Program Agreement to help us to be well positioned to grow and strengthen our position in the Channel. Integrated two significantly large companies with Indirect Channels into one Channel Program that overachieved their objectives for 2018. We held three regional Ascend events across the country to get out in the markets and get closer to our Partners to launch our new Partner Program and gain feedback on how to grow with our Partners in 2018 and beyond.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our goal for this year and beyond is for CenturyLink's Indirect Channel business to be a primary growth driver and continue to generate higher levels of profitable revenue for the company. To achieve this, we are focused on transformation to fully utilize our capabilities, to deliver a digital experience for our Partners and end customers across our portfolio of services.

Sandra Glaser Cheek

VP, Global Partners, Alliances

Ciena

Glaser Cheek led the launch of the Ciena Partner Network platform and program, which took a new collaborative and personalized approach that is designed to enable and reward all partners based on their unique value.

Years In Position: 1.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Leveraging Ciena's existing relationship-building strengths, I developed the Ciena Partner Network strategy, programmatic and operational framework to make partnering more "personal". Our partners have diverse ways of going to market and differing business models, and the new CPN embraces these differences, recognizing the unique value and needs of each partner on an individual basis. The emphasis of the program is being collaborative with our partners with a program infrastructure that is customized and flexible. The in-depth training, tools, and a focus on joint business planning can be tailored for each partner's individual needs, markets served, and go to market strategies. The reaction from our partners has been overwhelmingly positive. We are seeing exponentially more engagement with our training, partner portal usage and compliance to vital program requirements that drive sales growth. The initial launch was just the beginning; we will continue to evolve our offerings to further serve and enable our diverse community of partners.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? 2018 was a great year for Ciena and my goal in 2019 is to continue to win market share with our partners, and to exceed all of our targets related to our partner network. We will continue to increase our understanding of and engagement with our partners as they evolve their go-to-market strategies and business models in this disruptive technological environment. Significant enhancements will be launched as part of the Ciena Partner Network Program this year to address partner services opportunities as well as their ability to build robust, specialized business practices.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Providing the sales, technical, services and marketing enablement that aligns with each partner's unique business model. Collaboration and execution on a customized, approach to optimizing partners' Ciena-based business is at the heart of our success.

Gerri Elliott

EVP, Chief Sales, Marketing Officer

Cisco Systems

Elliott is refining Cisco’s strategy to be deliberate and consistent globally around who it sells to, what it sells, and how it shows up around the world to help partners align easier and help better care for customers.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 16

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In my role as Chief Sales and Marketing officer, I have the privilege of saying grace and caring for Cisco sales, our incredible partner community and now our marketing engine. That vantage point allows me to see opportunities for more alignment, simplification and growth. I also have an incredible leadership team that brings 125 years of collective experience in the Channel â€“ partners are a part of our team's DNA, just as they are a part of Cisco's. If we are simplifying programs and processes, focusing efforts around training and enablement, or investing and incentivizing to drive new software and lifecycle selling, we naturally think about how we will empower our partners. We want our partners right alongside us, growing their business, doing this with us. As an example, we've: o Updated Specializations to drive new software and lifecycle skills. Later this year, we will introduce a new Customer Experience Specialization to help partners build and deliver services across the lifecycle and provide a path to predictable, recurring revenue. o Increased partner incentives for building customer lifecycle practice skills and services including significantly evolving our Value Incentive Program (VIP) to focus on lifecycle selling and shifting to recurring revenues.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? The way customers buy, use and consume technology is changing. This requires thinking differently about what we build, how we engage customers and the entire lifecycle of our customer relationships. It's more than the initial sale, getting them to adopt, use, and love the technology is just as critical. Together with our partners, we must help customers realize the value of our technology over its lifetime. We are focused on enablement, training and incentives to help partners be successful. Additionally, we're providing partners new opportunities to differentiate and create new revenue streams through our open APIs and DevNet program.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? 1. Customer Success: build and deliver services across the customer lifecycle to capture more predictable, recurring revenue; 2. Invest in development skills to leverage Cisco's open APIs and programmability that enable partners to build their own IP and additional revenue streams; 3. Leverage the Cisco Ecosystem to reach new buying centers outside of IT where opportunities are more strategic, bigger, and more profitable.

Tricia Atchison

Group Director, Worldwide Partner Enablement, Marketing

Citrix Systems

Atchison focused on gaining deeper knowledge of industry trends and best practices to inform program development. She engaged with industry experts, learning the latest in technology offerings to create a better partner experience.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 22

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the last year, I have been focused on developing deeper and stronger partner relationships with key partners across various routes to market. By spending time with partners, I have a deeper understanding of their business, the opportunities we have together and what help partners need to capitalize on their investment and our program offerings based on their go to market priorities and solution focus. In addition, I have been focused on helping our partners to better utilize the tools and programs we offer to enhance their education and create integrated demand generation programs. I also focused on my team's development. Providing opportunities to enhance their skills and experience through industry workshops, partners meetings and cross-functional projects. Working cross-functionally throughout the organization has provided additional support for our partner community. By having deeper knowledge and understanding of the industry, the latest trends and their partners' go-to-market strategy, my team was more effective in building and executing plans and programs with our partners that contributed to the overall business achievements and results.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Citrix is focused on continuing to help our partners be successful by improving their customers' productivity and helping them migrate their customers to the cloud. We want our partners to provide incremental revenue contribution by reaching additional markets, industries and customers where they have access and expertise. We also want our partners to leverage our alliance relationships to tell a more integrated solution to capitalize on bigger opportunities. Partners will be able to utilize programs and tools including enablement, program offerings and demand generation tools to enhance their skills and reach into the marketplace.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In 2019, our partners will have the opportunity to help their customers have a better way to work by delivering the experience, security, and choice. People and organizations need to innovate, engage customers, and be productive. Our partners will want to engage in our key programs including enablement, demand generation, partner program offerings and partner advocacy. By taking advantage of these programs and tools, our partners can enhance their skills and knowledge of Citrix solutions, better identify opportunities and the needs within their customers and prospects and create a better business outcome for their customers.

Dalyn Wertz

Executive Director

Comcast Business

Wertz created and implemented a new strategy to increase the number of performing partners in the channel program. She made strong investments in MDF and an increased menu of marketing tools, including a content-rich app, Channel Express.

Years In Position: 4.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Under my direction, my team was responsible for architecting new enablement tools to support a new team of inside sales managers focused on SMB partners. These tools included an automated partner onboarding process to increase a partner's ability to gain traction through sales and marketing resources and education on our product portfolio which resulted in double-digit overall sales growth. We launched a new initiative called Px-19 that reflects the business culture of keeping our partners and customers first and foremost in our minds with a strong focus on Ease of Doing Business. This initiative reinforces the trust and confidence our partners have in Comcast Business and our program and shows our continued commitment to our sales partners. We invested in email marketing to reactivate dormant partners and educate them on our SD-WAN product. We continue to innovate through industry recognized sales tools such as our app, Channel Express, which walks our partners through the sales process via persona-based value propositions and fast access to sales and marketing content. We increased our marketing funds to our top tier partners while also making funds and resources available to our growing partners. My team successfully supported over 200 partner events in 2018.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our goals are to grow our partner base through our existing product set and expand their Comcast Business portfolio to include SD-WAN. We have increased the amount of resources to support our partners around SD-WAN including new solutions architects, operations support and an additional field engagement manager on my team to help engage and support field marketing activities. We will stay focused on improving ease of doing business through our PX-19 initiative with a platform for our partners' voices to be heard. Our program will continue to lead the industry with the strongest channel team, product portfolio and program benefits.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? My guidance to all channel partners is to embrace new technologies and be willing to modify and invest in your business model to adapt to changing channel and industry landscapes. Partners need to be willing to take risks and trust the vendors they can continue to grow with.

Shirley Scarborough

Director, Worldwide Channel Programs

Commvault

Scarborough simplified a program for partners to attain tier promotions and achieve broader recognition on eligible orders. She has also simplified processes for deal registration and business development funds requests.

Years In Position: 6

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? By focusing on program simplification and the communication process supporting our model that keeps Partners aware of their current tier compliance status, our goal is to provide our Partners with the information they need to accelerate achievement at a higher tier or the data they need to identify actions to sustain their current tier level. In addition, I continue to focus on identifying processes that have the greatest impact on "moving the needle" higher with regard to "ease of doing business" with Commvault.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I look forward to enhancing the deal registration process and policy to support our broader channel community, including strengthening our rules of engagement to address necessary changes as a channel-centric, powerhouse company. Top on our list is automating several aspects of our on-boarding process and creating Partner-facing dashboards. We continue to scale channel operations, improve our Partner Portal, grow our committed and invested Partner base, and drive the engagement and enablement of our Partner ecosystem to achieve mutual growth. Operational infrastructure investment is key to our advancing the needle in this area.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success relies on Partners hitting the right balance in their own transformation investments, as well as acquiring new competencies, developing new or expanded service catalogs, and investing in building their knowledge in some verticals so they become recognized by customers as a "trusted advisor."

Tina Fisher

Executive Director, Vendor Management

D&H Distributing

Fisher’s accomplishments included on-boarding and building new vendor relationships with her team across a range of segments. She also was key to rounding out D&H’s solutions and goto-market strategies for UC, videoconferencing and ProAV.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 26

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I was essential in helping to round-out D&H's solutions and go-to-market strategies for our unified communications, video conferencing, and ProAV practices. Through strong collaboration with other D&H counterparts and with our vendor partners, we are bringing our VARs and resellers the right products, programs, training, and enablement to help them build their practices, capitalize on opportunities in the channel, and be successful.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? The Vendor Management Team works to empower channel resellers with the solutions that will make them more competitive and successful, allowing them to grow their practices and resolve issues for their end customers. This includes helping resellers migrate to hosted offerings and cloud based services, addressing trends such as mobility, UCC and collaboration, ProAV, DaaS, cyber security, and hybrid infrastructures in SMB environments.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for our resellers is to take advantage of trends as they're emerging, getting as much support and product knowledge as possible in order to leverage opportunities as they arise. It's D&H's role to help educate our resellers on emerging opportunities such as Device as a Service and ProAV, including collaboration and digital signage, as those areas begin to gain serious momentum and provide new revenue potential for resellers.

Jennifer Walcott

VP, Marketing

D&H Distributing

Walcott has been focused on the growth of customer engagement programs throughout many of her positions, as well as managing internal partnerships. She has overseen the integration of marketing initiatives with effective sales activities for major channel companies.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 23

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I just began my work with D&H as of mid-2018, however, I've been tasked with giving a fresh eye to how the D&H team collaborates, both within the marketing team, and integrally with departments such as the sales and program development teams, to create cohesive, clever, and effective marketing that delivers value, impact, and delight to every client experience. Our initiatives will be goal-oriented, and always customer-centric. We thrive on finding new ways to empower VARs and help them expand their core competencies, all while increasing market penetration for our vendor community. Since customer engagement is a major focus of D&H, I will continue to drive that effort, to the benefit of both our reseller and our vendor partners.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? We're aligning our vendor and customer programs to support innovations in emerging areas such as Pro AV, digital signage, Device-as-a-Service, and cloud-based solutions. The objective is to provide the resources and product knowledge that resellers will require to seize these new opportunities and thrive as the marketplace makes its digital transformation. On a personal level, reciprocity is at my core. I intend to drive the concept of reciprocity throughout our marketing team, wherein vendor clients and reseller customers can expect to be surprised by small, kind gestures, without expectation of anything in return but their appreciation.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? At D&H, we believe that relationships are the key to success with customers, with vendor partners, and with any business partners. It's imperative to work collaboratively with those partners and to be accountable at all levels. The secret to long-term customer satisfaction lies in listening to their true pain points and learning about their business processes. Curiosity makes us powerful in that regard. You need to love to learn about your customer, then create impactful strategies and appropriate solutions based on that gathered knowledge.

Caroline Chapin

Director, Partner Marketing

Datto

The main objectives for Chapin this past year were driven by the merger of Datto and Autotask. She oversaw the implementation process to merge two global partner programs without disrupting partners’ ability to conduct business.

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 13

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? To help advance Datto's channel business this past year, Caroline led the overall global partner program merger strategy and oversaw the execution plan that was rolled out in a multi-phased approach. She worked closely with her team and key stakeholders across the organization to ensure all aspects of the program were being implemented and supported properly. Caroline also led her team in merging the legacy Autotask and Datto partner marketing automation platforms. She collaborated with her team and outside vendor to ensure a smooth migration process, without disrupting partners' current workflows. In the end, partners were thrilled to gain access to all combined Datto and Autotask marketing content to help them drive cross-sell opportunities and grow their monthly recurring revenue. In addition, Caroline joined the Disaster Response Team (DRT) leadership committee to support Datto's mission to extend additional support to partners when they need Datto most. While Datto products and support teams provide direct assistance to partners in everyday disaster situations, partners and their clients occasionally need more than that. Caroline led all internal and external communications to provide visibility into what Datto was doing to provide support to partners who were being directly impacted by life-threatening storms.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Over the next 12 months, Caroline's primary goals are to support Datto's corporate objectives as follows: 1. Help existing partners accelerate their BCDR product growth and reduce their time to revenue. 2. Help existing partners cross-sell new solutions to expand their services portfolio and provide better service to their clients. 3. Develop the strategy for a new global partner program that will support all partner types and all Datto solutions in 2020 and beyond.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for Datto's channel partners in 2019 is increased sales and marketing enablement. We know that these MSPs experience challenges with sales and marketing, so Datto is committed to providing tools and resources to help partners generate leads and uncover the opportunities easily and help them win new business. Those MSPs who want to grow and take their business to the next level, can't rely on referrals forever. This is why Caroline is committed to teaching our partners best practices for marketing and how to grow their business, effectively and efficiently.

Cheryl Cook

SVP, Global Partner Marketing

Dell Technologies

Cook managed a team that launched and executed a new My Rewards program. She also was an architect and co-contributor to the Dell Technologies Advantage Partner Framework and the Partner Preferred Program.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I managed the team that launched and executed MyRewards, a re-energized, points-based rewards program for sales makers at Dell EMC solution providers that replaced the previous partner advantage and sell and earn programs. The new, enriched reward platform featured personalized, engaging content, simple express claiming and bigger and better promotions with up to 3x bonus point opportunities. New Dell Technologies Advantage Partner Framework I co-lead a team of cross strategically-aligned businesses in a collaborative effort to develop a Dell Technologies partner framework that will make it easier for our collective channel partners to work across the Dell Technologies businesses. We are enabling partners to easily engage across the organization, with new training, demand generation materials, joint sales plays and solutions. President's Circle Recognition Program My team was responsible for creating, launching and executing our very first President's Circle Awards program, where we recognized partners who have delivered exceptional results over the course of the year, with a grand prize trip to the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. Spanning our entire partner ecosystem, we tracked various financial metrics over the course of the year and announced winners at the Global Partner Summit during Dell Technologies World.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? We will continue to invest and refine our Dell EMC Partner Program, collaborating with our partners and expanding across all Dell EMC solution areas. We will continue to refine digital marketing tools and resources to support partners as they transform their business along their own digital journey. We will continue to build a partner program that makes it easy for our partners to leverage the entire Dell Technologies family of strategically-aligned businesses. We will make it easier for partners to work across the organization with improved sales engagement, industry recognized skills, capabilities and programs that help deliver solutions to customers.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? According to Dell Technologies' Digital Transformation Index survey that was launched by Vanson Bourne in 2016, CIOs are undertaking major IT transformation initiatives to enable the business to better compete in the digital age, and there is unprecedented opportunity here for our channel partners. The key to success for our channel partners is to know how Dell EMC and its strategically-aligned businesses within the Dell Technologies family are uniquely positioned to serve all our customers digital, IT, workforce and security transformation needs. And, they need to get digital themselves, by leveraging our digital marketing platform for their digital marketing campaigns.

Joyce Mullen

President, Global Channel, OEM, IoT

Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies Global Channel delivered $49 billion in orders. Partners helped Dell take share in storage, servers and PCs and the company achieved its highest partner Net Promoter Score, signaling that partners are all in and excited about the progress.

Years In Position: 1.5

Years In Channel: 7

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Everything begins and ends with people. My focus this year has been on ensuring we have the right people in the right positions, all marching towards the right goals. The results are clear; thanks to the remarkable Channel and OEM teams, this strategy is paying off. Darren Sullivan's strategy, programs and operations teams has delivers faster deal registrations and pricing approvals; leading to a record-high partner NPS score. In Q3, Scott Millard's Specialty Sales team enabled partners to deliver 12 percent Storage growth Y/Y, gaining share and continuing Dell EMC's reign as the #1 storage provider worldwide. Cheryl Cook's team launched MyRewards, simplifying partners' rebate claiming process and offering bigger and better opportunities. Not to mention, our channel sales teams are on fire; in Q3 they drove 21 percent global order revenue growth. I could go on and on, but it all comes back to people, and I believe we have the industry's best. It's been my responsibility to help break down barriers, empower the team to do the extraordinary work I know they're capable of, then recognize their success.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? We are on a mission to be the best, in the eyes of our partners. We know that predictability is key and our strategy is sound, so this year, we'll continue to double down on these three strategic imperatives: 1. Continue to make it easier for partners to do more business with us. 2. Make it easier to transact and engage across the full Dell Technologies family of brands. 3. Help our partners embrace and monetize emerging technologies.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Help customers realize the benefits of Digital, IT, Workforce and Security transformations. Do this by combining your knowledge of customers' environments with your transformational consulting capabilities. By 2025, there will be 163 zettabytes of data! Help customers harness and derive real value from it. And, support it with the full Dell Technologies portfolio - especially Dell EMC Storage. Partners will make the most money when they sell our data center solutions, specifically storage, and attach our service offerings, peripherals, software and Dell Financial Services.

Mary Catherine Wilson

Sr. Director, Global Marketing

Dell Technologies

Wilson delivered an improved partner portal experience and new sales portal. Marketers received access to new campaigns and concierge marketing services through Dell’s Digital Marketing Platform.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 12

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? My role in advancements in our channel business came through investments in our partner portal and Digital Marketing Platform. New campaigns, such as IT Transformation, are housed in the platform. In marketing, the digital landscape is critical. People research technology and make informed buying decisions online. I am laser focused on helping our partners grow, find new customers and serve existing customers. We continue to invest in bringing rich content and tools to market. The Digital Marketing Platform is easy to use and saves time. Partners can activate campaigns and generate leads through email, social and content syndication in 12 languages. One partner, through the platform and concierge services, got in front of the right decision makers at the right time in the buying cycle to keep their sales team's pipeline full. They gained access to active prospects and specific information about their solution needs and this data helped to improve the pipeline impact of their marketing campaigns resulting in millions to pipeline in less than six months. Marketing Institute, located within the Partner Academy, is also a valuable asset to enable your team to discover the benefits our programs, tools, and resources to enhance their marketing efforts.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Partners have the opportunity to leverage new programs to drive their profitability and make doing business easier. The channel team is simplifying certifications, piloting programs across the family of brands, and driving new programs, such as Enterprise Partner Preferred and Commercial Partner Preferred. Check out the Partner portal for more details and your ability to provide customers with access to the entire portfolio of Dell Technologies and new solutions in the coming year from edge to core to cloud.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Successful partners are ones that can sell across multiple lines of businesses and bring new Dell Technologies solutions to their customers. Many new solutions will be launched at Global Partner Summit during Dell Technologies World. Join us in April to learn about new solutions, new programs, and new paths to profitability.

Sommer Goodknecht

Manager, Channel Marketing

Eaton

Throughout 2018, Goodknecht worked more closely with Eaton’s partner community to understand and implement process improvements to make it easier to do business with Eaton in the channel.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 7

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In the pursuit of continuous improvement, I worked with my team to review partner feedback from the 2017 Annual Report Card. We heard loud and clear what partners were telling us and intentionally applied this feedback in 2018, resulting in Eaton being recognized as the 2018 Annual Report Card champion in the Power Protection and Management product category. We were proud to receive this honor, as it reflected our continued loyalty and commitment to channel over the years.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our biggest goal this year is to reward partners who have invested in their relationship with Eaton via our revamped PowerAdvantage partner program. This year marks Eaton's tenth year in the channel, and we've continued to watch the channel evolve over the years. Our new channel program tiers will recognize those who invest their time in Eaton certifications and provide them with additional benefits and incentives. We've specifically designed the new channel tiers to help partners as they seek new ways to deliver better solutions for customers and generate recurring revenue from their business with Eaton.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? This year, the key to success for our channel partners is taking advantage of the refreshed partner program. We recently announced our new channel program tiers at Eaton's 2019 Partner Summit in February, and we're looking forward to collaborating with our partners in new ways and rewarding those who've invested in their relationship with us.

Jules Johnston

VP, Partner Sales

Equinix

Johnston championed the pivot Equinix made in the past year to fully embrace partner sales and guided its execution. Her collaborators include colleagues across partner sales, partner programs, partner sales operations and field sales, and much progress has been made.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? First, I've built a really strong team. Year over year, we've doubled our Americas Partner Sales force, adding fresh energy and eyes to our team as it meets the challenge of further developing a highly successful channel sales model within an already very successful and growing company. Chief among the team's changes this year was adding a Director layer of management to help me scale my efforts, and I'm exceptionally proud of the contributions these leaders are making. Moreover, three years into this journey in the Americas I think we finally had enough proof points that we were directionally correct in our channel partner strategy and could make well-informed bets on where to focus in 2018. Those bets and our more zealous focus are finally beginning to pay off. We're intentionally investing in partners with national reach and enterprise cloud expertise. We're very intentionally aligning with the adjacent cloud providers, storage and security technologies that leverage Platform Equinix to help customers reach their digital transformation objectives.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Numerically we seek to continue dramatically increasing the percentage of Equinix's total bookings and new customer acquisitions that come through and are favorably influenced by our partners. To do this we need to continue cementing a partner-first mentality within our field sales organization, achieve wider-spread awareness of the value of Platform Equinix among our partners, and more efficiently combine forces with alliance partners like Microsoft, Cisco, Google and others to help customers digitally transform to capitalize on hybrid cloud.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Integrating Equinix's strategy with a partner's to better meet our shared clients' needs than separate solutions can do.

Lisa Citron

VP, North American Channel Sales

This past year has been all about the cloud. Citron has built out programs working directly with AWS and Microsoft and on-boarded a specialist channel team who works with channel resources and partners to help them take F5 into their cloud practices.

Years In Position: 0.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Shortly after taking over the North American Channel Chief role, I had the opportunity to lead our team through the design and delivery of F5's Partner Leadership Summit. This was a pivotal event as our partners had been looking to see more innovation from F5 and understand where we are going in the future - and we delivered. Senior leaders from F5 took the stage to help our partners understand how F5 fits into the multi-cloud environments that they are designing for customers. We were able to bring our partners under the "tent" with us and provide a view into the future of application services. F5 is leading with technology innovation and programs support our partners in their journey. It's an exciting time to be at a great channel first company who is also innovating for the future.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I am focused at getting our F5 channel team and our partners back to basics. With messages coming at the channel from every direction, it's easy to forget that we are selling products and services because our joint customers have a challenge. Understanding the core use cases and helping our partners meet their customers' needs with innovative products, consumption models and services is the F5 Channel team mission. Additionally, we will continue our strong focus on Cloud and Application Development partners who are helping customers securely transform their businesses.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Embrace the cloud -- It's definitely not too late! Partners still represent a trusted advisor to customers and can help their customers make sure that they are using the right technology in the right environment (public cloud, private cloud, co-location) to support their apps and infrastructure needs. Customers need your advice and help.

Melissa McCoy

VP, Channel Sales

Flexential

In her new role, McCoy has been working cross-functionally within Flexential to align resources to better support partners. This includes building out the partner program, creating new partner enablement tools, and streamlining and automating channel systems and processes.

Years In Position: 0.75

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Since starting at Flexential, I've helped advance our channel business by working cross-functionally within the organization to align resources to better support our partner program as well as drive new channel go-to-market strategies. This includes creating new partner enablement tools and resources that make it easier for our partners to recognize opportunities, position services with their customers and win more business with Flexential. I have also focused on further integrating the channel business into Flexential's IT systems and processesâ€”including enhancements around partner lead registration, opportunity tracking and automated commission reporting. Our goal is to help our partners grow their business while providing a positive partner experience with Flexential.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? There has been significant progress made integrating the two channel programs at Peak 10 and ViaWest in 2018. In 2019, we will continue to invest in partner enablement through the development of new tools and resources -- including playbooks, use cases and training -- that will help our partners identify and close new revenue opportunities. In addition, we are planning to roll out a new partner portal to make it easier for partners to access information, register leads and track partner commissions.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Cloud has changed the game on how customers are looking to solve their IT challenges and achieve better business outcomes. As trusted advisors, partners are in a unique position to help customers navigate this new world of hybrid IT and decide what applications should stay on-premise vs off-premise, which should go to private cloud vs. public cloud, etc. Partners who can help customers navigate these complex IT initiatives with expertise in colocation, network and cloud will be able to differentiate themselves and drive the most value for their customers.

Stacey Wu

SVP, Global Marketing

Fortinet

Wu championed several investments in innovative programs for the channel, including a restructuring of the approach to the market, the introduction of a partner survey tool, and a new rewards program. Fortinet partners are now seeing more value and more growth.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 22

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Stacey led the investment in a partner survey tool to measure the overall satisfaction and effectiveness of our program. This tool, as well as other "touches" to receive feedback, has allowed us to be nimble in our approach and make informed decisions as we evolve our partner program. In 2019, the survey tool will evolve to a constant feedback loop with integration into our CRM to allow our channel representatives to respond quickly and efficiently to partner feedback. Along with the introduction of the survey tool, Stacey has steered the restructuring of our channel marketing organization to better support our partners who serve various business segments (SMB, enterprise, service provider, etc.). The restructuring allows for better resource allocation across the company, a more strategic approach to the business, and ultimately enables us to serve our partners the information, leads, training, etc., that is most relevant to them. Stacey also drove the investment in a new partner rewards program, FortiRewards, that is innovative and flexible. The new program helps participants become more efficient and proficient in their roles -- from learning how to better qualify customers to specific Fortinet knowledge.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our key focus will be to drive awareness and engagement with partners across all segments while enhancing our channel program's value through innovative programs. We want our partners to feel empowered through training, expert support, and our powerful, broad, and automated solutions.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Adaptation, without a doubt. Customers are realizing the value of technology and making investments in it for business outcomes, not simply business enablement. And with this comes the introduction of significant security risks. Partners need to be ready for this by seeking out vendors and solutions that help them address this risk with their customers while still helping them build and grow a profitable business.

Michelle Hodges

VP, Worldwide Channels, Alliances

Gigamon

Hodges completely relaunched the partner program to be performance- and-value- focused. She delivered 20 percent pipeline creation via the channel and is on track to delivering 20 percent truly incremental channel revenue.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 24

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Pitched and received approval Board & C-Suite for a fully Channel First strategy for 2019.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goals for the company's channel business success over the next year are a 20% Incremental revenue derived from the channel, and 80% program compliance, and and increased margin to the channel by 10%.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success is delivering performance and value by taking advantage of all the investments and commitment on offer from Gigamon.

Carolee Gearhart

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

Google Cloud

With Gearhart promoting a channel-focused mantra over the past year, partner participation in Google Cloud transactions has more than doubled. Top-performing partners across the globe are experiencing triple-digit year-over-year growth.

Years In Position: 8

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? We have worked to engage our partners in a world-class experience across every aspect of partnering with Google. This expands way beyond the typical service opportunities and financial benefits of partnerships into our core product offerings designed for innovation and collaboration, sharing insights around world-class recruitment, hiring and culture development and pro-active engagement of our partners in our core solution areas.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Over the course of 2019, I would like to see our channel business increase overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, increase the amount of professional services going through partners and to really extend the Google experience through our partners all over the world.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Our philosophy for the channel and our partners in 2019 is built on the principles of openness, innovation, fairness, transparency, and shared success in the cloud market. Partners will see success when they decide to partner with Google Cloud because they are gaining access to our entire ecosystem. As companies within the ecosystem begin to work together, our partners are able to expand their businesses in entirely new ways.

Nina Harding

Chief, Global Partner Strategy, Programs

Google Cloud

Harding joined Google a little over a year ago and since then the partner ecosystem and Google Cloud transactions have more than doubled. Top-performing partners across the globe are experiencing triple-digit year-over-year growth.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? When I joined Google in Oct 2017, I immediately orchestrated focus groups with over 320 partners around the globe to understand the critical levers for a healthy Google Cloud ecosystem. Together with the partners, we have launched critical new incentives, initiatives, and will unveil our new partner program - Partner Advantage in April! I also orchestrated a cultural adoption of partner-first, ensuring 100% of our direct Google Cloud deals have a partner attached, 100% of our marketing campaigns include partners, and 100% of our professional services engagements include partners. My efforts, together with my incredible team, have created the most compelling, collaborative, and innovative ecosystem in the market.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I want our channel business to increase overall percentage of company revenue coming through the channel, increase the amount of professional services going through partners and continue to grow our overall channel program. In addition to achieving 100% partner attach to deals, marketing, and sales, I'm focused on simplifying engagement consolidating multiple avenues to partnership into one cohesive program. Our strategy is not to build a Professional Services Organization, but rather, a "Partner" Services Organization where our consultants engage with clients on early adoption, build best practices, train and mobilize partners, and build an incredibly strong services ecosystem in market.

Carmela Chartrand

VP, CFO, Worldwide Channel, Alliances

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Chartrand led finance efforts to deliver the successful fiscal 2019 launch of a restructured “Partner Ready” incentive program. This initiative drove consistent global rebate structures.

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 3

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? The successful timely launch of the restructured Partner Ready reseller program has yielded favorable business outcomes in HPE's fiscal 2019.The initial top line and profit performance related to this program shows strong, profitable value product sales growth across most geographies and value product categories with a strong program ROI for both HPE and channel partners. MDF related profit optimization efforts Carmela personally influenced include a shift away from spend activities with low correlation to top line growth and implementation of globally consistent, efficient spend and planning processes. The $1B CaaS HPE partnership with an external global system integrator has been executed and enabled from a staffing and investment perspective and shows strong fiscal 2019 late stage sales pipeline. The parallel channel focused CaaS business is ramping from both a revenue and pipeline perspective with considerable "greenfield" account opportunities supported by effective sales enablement and execution. Carmela has delivered a restructured system integrator Alliance program to achieve $25M annualized spend savings alongside more effective sales compensation and spend related internal controls. A broader related contra savings and investment redeployment initiative facilitated by Carmela has delivered $100M favorable P&L impact.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Lead finance efforts related to a restructured distribution focused incentive program to simplify rebate structures and shift investments to HPE's higher margin value portfolio. Lead in some instances and facilitate in others continued MDF profit optimization efforts expected to deliver profitable Silver and Business partner sales growth and SMB & Midmarket customer segment sales growth among Platinum partners. Measure and influence the evolution of the restructured Partner Ready program for resellers to deliver channel led value product growth Enhance Alliance partner sales productivity measures and related internal sales compensation efforts.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to channel partners' success in 2019 is enabling a solutions sales, hybrid IT focused mindset and skillset among partners' sales teams. The market and technical landscape has evolved to be one where customers value IT solutions that address specific use cases and business problems, often in Hybrid IT environments.Our field sellers should be trained and enabled to deliver such solutions.

Mary Davis

Sr. Director, Channel Sales Strategy, Planning

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Davis emphasizes that relationships and predictability are the currency of the channel. Over the past year, she has changed her team’s structure to improve field engagement and simplified the Partner Ready program.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 8

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Historically, HPE has always had several teams supporting the channel business. Over the last year, I've brought together the channel operations, program and strategy teams with the sales operations teams to support HPE's 100% indirect route-to-market segments. With this change, there was a clear improvement in field engagement within these segments and allowed these teams to communicate with HPE's partner community in more efficient and effective ways. During FY18, my team and I also removed significant complexity from HPE's partner Ready program, which gave partners more predictability in their HPE earnings. My team and I created (and continues to create) innovative ways to reward and co-invest in new partner business models, supporting both growth and transformation.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My primary goal is to continue the increase of both share and total amount of business HPE does through the channel and its Alliance partners. Two examples of how my team and I are doing this include: With a focus on partner programs, we're proactively bringing partners into new customer engagements and ensuring we win together, particularly in the small business and mid-market segments. Through continuous improvement in HPE's award-winning Partner Ready Program, my team and I are continuing consistent engagement with the channel and evolving the programs and incentives to match the way partners' businesses are transforming.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? HPE has long believed that the world would be hybrid, and we're seeing that come to fruition. Our most successful solution providers do two things: help their customers determine the optimal mix of workloads between cloud and on-premise solutions running on HPE hardware, and leverage our Greenlake program to deliver HPE performance tied to the consumption model financials their customers demand.

Jas Sood

VP, Sales, Mid-Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

In Sood’s sales leadership role, she declared that her organization is 100 percent channel route to market. She implemented a “Go to Partner” program that creates trust between sales team and partners to acquire new customers.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 9

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? With developing the Go to Partner program, we acquired over 1500 new customers last year. We also demonstrated loyalty to our partners and helped to grow each other's business. This program and partnership demonstrated a strong sense of joint accountability as well as willingness to share information and develop strategic plans as one collective team. My business grew 10% y/y with margin growth as well.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goal is to gain 2-4% incremental share of wallet in partnership with our channel community. We will do this together by hunting and focusing on net, new customers. The Go to Partner program I implemented will drive the two way accountability. The program encompasses marketing demand generation, customer acquisition events and agreed upon acquisition targets to focus on.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Key is to be committed, engaged and to create a true partnership. My sales team shows up every day at partners' offices and work together to win more business. You can't just say it, you need to walk the talk. I believe in creating strong relationships and doing that with our channel partners is key.

Cheri Wesinger

Sr. Director, Channel Marketing

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Wesinger continues to implement programs to achieve three major goals: more closely align HPE with the channel; ensure partners use the latest and best available tools; and increase the solutions available to sell/resell.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 4

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? HPE Channel has continued to emphasize the Super 6 â€“ initiatives that align the company's strengths with customer needs. Partners play an active role by also aligning their own strengths within the initiatives to create an extremely strong differentiator for them. In the marketplace. We have also developed special programs to make innovations like AI-based storage / computing and consumption models available for them to sell on an accelerated basis, resulting in dramatic sales increases for them. We also have consistently encouraged them to make optimum use of digital marketing by providing them with training, self-evaluations tools, best practices and more. This has had a significant effect on their marketing success.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I am looking to constantly increase the share of sales that comes from the channel, while ensuring that all partners know how much HPE appreciates their contribution to our mutual success. For the coming year, the keyword is "more." More alignment, involvement, outreach. More emphasis on programs that have proven to work for partners. More access to the solutions we know will help them capture more than their share of the marketplace.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Working with HPE @Innovation and growth. HPE is designing solutions to improve the world we live in, through the datacenters we work in.

Stephanie Dismore

VP, GM, Americas Channels

HP Inc.

Dismore and her team successfully brought growth back to every HP category, spanning PCs, print, supplies and services. They also drove strong year-over-year partner growth.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? As one of few Channel Chiefs in the IT industry with responsibility for both Commercial and Consumer channels, I have a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities our Partners face across both routes to market in an increasingly complex sales environment. I've been able to use that knowledge to help our Partners drive growth in alignment with key market opportunities, navigate the omnichannel landscape and create a cohesive experience for our end-user customers. As a channel-first company, we have also made it a priority to ensure we enable the channel for continued growth amidst changing market dynamics by providing Partners with the programs, resources, trainings and certifications they need to optimize revenue opportunities and future-proof their businesses, while maintaining the consistency and predictability they need to focus on customers. Additionally, as we look to create a positive impact on the communities we serve, my team and I launched "HP Channel for Change," a formal community service initiative in partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Through jointly held volunteer events, HP and our Partners have an opportunity to promote STEM educational activities, spark an interest in technology for children, and inspire a new generation of technology leaders.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our primary goal is to ensure the continued growth and profitability of our channel Partners in alignment with key market opportunities, while also ensuring they are prepared to take advantage of future growth opportunities driven by the digital transformation of our global economy and society. As a channel-first company, we are also committed to continuing to provide our Partners with innovative, ground-breaking new products and solutions that our customers need and want, as well as world-class partner programs and marketing, and the support of our people.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? To remain competitive in today's rapidly changing marketplace, channel Partners must be nimble, embrace a growth mindset, and understand how to adapt to new market realities and shifting business models. There are massive trends in the market that we see as opportunities, and it will be critical to our mutual success to remain aligned on strategic priorities and invest together in the areas where we see the most potential. Partners must also continue to take advantage of the vast array of sales and marketing tools, resources and programs HP makes available to enable their success.

Dorothy Copeland

VP, North America Partner Ecosystem

IBM

Copeland has been laser-focused on improving the IBM partner experience. Key has been listening to and taking action on partner feedback, and she has led her team to give partners the programs they need to be successful.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I have advanced our partner business over the past year by focusing on enabling partners to grow and delivering on their suggestions for improvement. My leadership team and I took an agile approach to drive improvements in key areas by forming small cross-functional teams and regularly tracking our collective progress. First, we focused on enhancing sales engagement by deploying vertical market ecosystem leadership, providing education for IBM sellers on how to engage effectively with partners and establishing more executive relationships between IBM partners and IBM sales executives. Secondly, we improved our software programs by enabling IBM partners to more easily sell and manage IBM software. This includes providing deal registration, special bid protection, SaaS tools for partners to more easily deploy and manage their clients' IBM software solutions and enabling partners to participate in more contractual vehicles. Finally, we delivered new partner sales incentives and channel-only products. Our incentives rewarded partners' sellers for driving IBM security, storage and power revenue. We launched our first partner-only storage product line, Storwize, available only via IBM partners. While we still have more improvements to make, IBM partners report that they are selling more, engaging more and finding more success with their IBM business.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My ultimate goal is for IBM to become recognized as the industry's leading vendor for ecosystem partners. Virtually any client's business challenge can be solved with IBM technology and our strong ecosystem of partners. We'll continue to enable partners to grow their business across our full portfolio, ensuring partners are deploying innovative solutions to new and existing clients, and enabling partners to benefit from our well-developed and lucrative partner programs. While we will continue to grow our current partners in new ways, we will also recruit and develop partners that are new to IBM.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? We are encouraging IBM partners to continue to find new ways to build their businesses, whether it is developing software offerings on top of IBM technology; reselling our systems, software and cloud solutions; providing services of all types to clients; or enhancing partners' offerings across more areas of the IBM portfolio. With such a broad range of technology from IBM, the possibilities for partners to help their clients are virtually endless. At IBM, we'll continue to engage partners more with the IBM sales force, help partners win new clients, enable partners in new ways and improve our partner programs.

Jacqueline Woods

Chief Marketing Officer, Partner Ecosystem

IBM

Woods’ key accomplishments included increased partner usage across the platform by retiring campaign content and re-energizing new partners as well as launching 13 SaaS campaigns to active and dormant partners.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 5

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I've personal advanced IBM's channel business by: Positioned IBM as vendor of choice through M2BP activities Helped partners deliver pipeline. Embraced more types and models across the ecosystem -- ex. ESA co-marketing pilot Added thousands of new partners (13K?) -- including start-ups, ISVs, and SIs. Simplified IBM's co-marketing program (admin, contracts, reporting). Launched a new Market & Competitive Intelligence site with >150 papers and studies. Drove more SaaS through partners and through 3PMs

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Marketing's 2019 goals for the channel include: Continue to simplify our programs and processes Grow SaaS and overall marketing contribution Improve return from co-marketing investments. Scale sales enablement solution to 90K users. Drive Business Results by (1) helping Partners generate demand; (2) Recurring Revenue streams (3) SaaS Signings revenue. Partner Success: (1) Help Partners reach new clients in the Growth Segment (2) Transition Partners to aaS / Consumption Model â€¢ Skills: (1) Enable Partners & Agencies re programs that drive Brand results eg Co-Marketing, Competency; (2) Help transformation of Campaigns to digital execution.

Enit Nichani

VP, Marketing, North America

IGEL

IGEL is a 100 percent channel-focused company, and in her role Nichani is responsible for elevating the IGEL message with partners and their customers through comprehensive marketing plans and programs.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 9

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? During 2018, I spearheaded the IGEL IT Ballers campaign, which culminated in six $20,000 prizes given out over the course of the year. We actively engaged prospects at events and tradeshows with a short survey, and a time commitment for a 30-minute demo. Online techniques were also used to capture leads. As part of the campaign, I also helped our Platinum and select Gold level channel partners leverage the campaign through co-branded campaign kits resulting in 300+ completed surveys and co-hosted demonstrations. Supporting the campaign was a massive PR, advertising, social media and event marketing effort that drove prospect engagement at 250+ global events, culminating in a customer success story contest where five finalists faced off against each other in a public voting event. The winner of the final $20,000 prize was Diversicare CIO, April Marbury, who donated the prize money to The Diversicare Disaster & Relief Foundation. Ultimately, the campaign generated over 3,000 new evaluation requests and resulted in close to 500 completed product demos, pointing to over $5M in new sales opportunities for IGEL and our channel partners. In 2018, IGEL had a landmark year, surpassing $100M in revenues worldwide. In the U.S., revenues were up by 79%.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I look forward to continuing to provide our channel partners with marketing resources and programs that help them demonstrate the key differentiators of IGEL's powerful endpoint optimization and control solutions for the secure enterprise. One of the ways we are accomplishing this in 2019 is through a new campaign where we will give away a brand new Porsche Taycan. We have created co-branded campaign kits for all of our Platinum level partners. Each campaign kit includes a co-branded e-mail templates, social media cards and presentations they can use to generate leads.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In 2019, IGEL will move to a licensing model that completely separates software from hardware. Partners will need to grasp the fact that IGEL's hardware is not the primary driver of sales. Those partners that understand will be able to participate in multi-million dollar ELAs. Those that don't will be relegated to selling a few hundred IGEL hardware units. Partners should be positioned as trusted advisors in the customer's Vertical (or Micro-Vertical). They will need to understand software defined "everything" and how the customer will be moving to the cloud.

Salena Butler

VP, Channel

Infor

Butler leads the North America Partner Council. The council’s mission is to help prioritize the areas in which Infor needs improvement. This feedback and structure has and will continue to help Infor make positive changes for the betterment of its partner community.

Years In Position: 9

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? We are always striving to make the relationships with our partners more successful and profitable at Infor. We also want to make doing business with us as easy as possible. There are a lot of moving pieces at a global company. One way we have been able to make positive changes for our partners, and better listen to the partner community, is through our Partner Councils. I lead the NA Partner Council today. This council's mission is to help prioritize the areas in which we need improvement. This feedback and structure, has, and will continue to help Infor make positive changes for the betterment of our partner community. The work of the NA Partner Council as directly lead to improvements in our products both from a functionality and usability standpoint. We have also impacted how leads are currently being routed to our partners, how we execute during the sales cycle and how we support our customers long term.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I have 3 main goals this year. The first is to continue to invest in my team. My number one priority is to try to clear as many hurdles for them as possible so they can be successful. The second goal is to make our partner's lives easier and to truly make doing business with Infor as easy as possible. The more profitable we can make our business relationships for the partners, the better. Finally, revenue growth is another huge driver. I feel if I can do number 1 and 2 successfully, then 3 will be a byproduct.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The main keys to success this year for our partners is evolving and capturing the move to cloud. It is helping their customers understand the importance of what the cloud can offer them and allow them to stay ahead of their competition.

Renne Bergeron

SVP, Global Cloud

Ingram Micro

Bergeron executed against Ingram Micro’s promise to power any company in the world to participate in the digital economy by providing a hyper-scale digital platform, access to an infinite ecosystem, and proven acceleration services.

Years In Position: 9

Years In Channel: 9

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? We expanded our IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) business with the hyperscale leaders Microsoft Azure, AWS and IBM Cloud, and launched IaaS LifeCycle Services including Discovery & Assessment, Architecture & Design, Proof of Concept and Migration. These moves positioned us as a clear leader in IaaS and resulted in 100%+ growth in our IaaS business. We expanded our cloud portfolio with 200+ vendor partners, a combination of traditional and born-in-the-cloud vendors, and we simplified onboarding by providing a self-onboarding platform for vendors and ISVs joining the Ingram Micro Cloud ecosystem. At our 2018 Cloud Summit, I introduced the Cloud Awesomeness roadmap, providing channel partners a framework to grow and profit in the as-a-service economy. Throughout the year, we also expanded our cloud ecosystem, serving as the platform of choice of more than 200 service providers around the world, including some recent additional with T-Mobile, O2, Colt, Zones, and more. Additionally, we rebranded our cloud commerce platform to CloudBlue and connected the Ingram Micro Cloud portfolio to all service providers using the CloudBlue platform as their cloud commerce engine. At the close of 2018, 55K channel partners used our Ingram Micro Cloud marketplace to manage nearly 4 million fully automated seats.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? We will continue help our channel partners become Cloud Awesome -- providing them with a cross-selling journey that maximizes customer value and their profitability. This includes enhancing and expanding our Cloud Marketplace and our Ingram Micro Cloud Ecosystem. Additionally, we will continue to help our channel partners offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service and successfully migrate their customers' workloads to the cloud. Another one of our goals is to create the portfolio of the future, by continuing to onboard global vendors, and providing self-onboarding capabilities for ISVs, as well as all service providers using CloudBlue as their cloud eCommerce engine.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? By cross-selling, channel partners can grow the long-term value of their customers and increase their top and bottom line. Additionally, we're encouraging channel partners to use integrated digital marketing to acquire new customers, and then provide them with an end-to-end, self-service experience versus transacting on their behalf.

Gina Mastantuono

Chief Financial Officer

Ingram Micro

Mastantuono worked with partners to bring to market creative financing solutions for their end customers. She also increased credit lines, offered more flexible terms options, and got involved earlier in the sales cycle to help partners win deals.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 6

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Through encouragement, enablement and an unstoppable drive for excellence, I have worked to help our teams evolve Ingram Micro from a credit department to a powerful financial services organization. Now, in additional to providing credit to our channel partners, we also offer them a portfolio of flexible financial services including renting, leasing and long-term payable solutions, as well as custom financing options to help them profitably grow their businesses. Over the last two years, our U.S. financing team for example has helped build the business and our value by adhering to a simple mantra: "The only deal we haven't financed, is the one we don't know about." This approach has led to a game-changing ask of our channel partners: "Don't wait until the close. Bring us in early in the sales process." We've seen incredible gains as a result of our ability to help partners better finance their own operations, as well as their customers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? As a company, we will continue to embrace change and anticipate the needs of our partners and associates, consistently evolving our business ahead of market shifts. For the channel, this means finding more ways to add value, differentiate and solve for the needs of their customers. One of the many ways we're doing this is by providing our channel partners access to smart and sophisticated yet simple financial solutions and services. Financing remains one of the most valuable resources we offer our channel partners and is a clear differentiator for Ingram Micro.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The most successful channel partners will continue to embrace and successfully manage change while maintaining levels of consistency and improving the experience for their team and the customers they serve. Agility and collaboration are key. Set goals, share goals and work together with your associates, partners and customers to execute against them. This industry changes too fast to go it alone.

Susan O'Sullivan

VP, Sales

Ingram Micro

In 2018, O’Sullivan led Ingram Micro’s customer segmentation initiative, which is working to understand more about channel partners’ business to better align Ingram Micro’s resources and deliver an even better customer experience.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 29

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? We had a strong year in 2019, growing our revenues and finding new and different ways to engage and enable our channel partners to accelerate their success. One of the ways I've helped advance the business is by encouraging our people to think differently and spend more time getting to know the business they work with. Take our SMB organization for example, this team's "Talking Shop" series has taken off by breaking the mold and bringing partners together in a more casual environment to learn and network. As the Buffalo Campus Champion, I work closely with our HR team to encourage more community outreach and inspire a positive work culture. Our efforts continue to pay off and our Buffalo office remains one of the best places to work in Buffalo, NY.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our focus remains on improving the customer experience and getting closer to our channel partners to better understand their business needs, as well as the needs of their customers. One of the many ways we are doing this is by cross-training our teams, asking more questions, working across the organization as ONE Ingram Micro and leveraging the data we have to identify opportunities for growth and more in-depth enablement.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Ask questions and take advantage of the vast opportunities and resources available from Ingram Micro to help you grow your business more profitably. By operating as ONE Ingram Micro, we're able to better serve our channel partners' needs and provide them with a clear line of sight into all aspects of our business including our financial services, advanced solutions, cloud marketplace and more.

Kim Carlton

Director, Channel Sales Development

Intel

Carlton has helped shape how Intel markets with its channel partners. In addition, she has helped the company operationalize its channel efforts and drive sales/ marketing excellence via Center of Excellence team she organized and chairs.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 10

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In the past year, I've helped advance Intel's channel business in several ways. I've driven significant revenue growth for both my partner and Intel through the development and execution several sales and marketing program. This took collaboration and partnership with my partner, ecosystem partners and Intel. I drove partner and internal (Intel) collaboration to lead the channel and change the way Intel markets with our channel partners. We have developed a framework to develop and execute integrated marketing programs that maximize investments/budgets, improved the end customer experience and drive sales. And, I've initiated and grown the Marketing COE (Center of Excellence), a task force team that has driven operational efficiencies and sales and marketing excellence through our entire channel organization.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Growth through partnerships, discipline, risk-taking and customer obsession!

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Growth through partnerships and delivering innovative technology solutions to their customers that solve those customer's business challenges.

Tiffany Sargent

Chief IoT Architect, U.S. Channel Scale Partners

Intel

Sargent defined and incubated an IoT scale initiative. She created an actionable strategy to drive technology enablement by educating partners on IoT and creating a program that blended technology, business and go-to-market objectives.

Years In Position: 1.4

Years In Channel: 5

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In 2018, Tiffany established a direction for Partner Scale in IoT. This was a new role that would require (1) assessment of the ecosystem (2) development of an Intel Internal strategy, tactics, and an operating infrastructure to be adopted across US Sales, and (3) building IoT relationships with partners and developing IoT account plans. Tiffany set a direction that sprouted from the creation of a simplified, consumable, and actionable plan that aligned with the goals of partners both at an abstract level and at an account specific level. This was different than previously established pathways engagement. Through analysis and collection of ecosystem data and partner collaboration, she recognized that we needed backbone technology anchors. She observed that CSPs and sometimes hardware investments (like routers) would become the backbones around IoT choices at each partner cementing their importance for an IoT plan. By collecting data and studying the partners and ecosystem behavior, she communicated key findings that have shaped her company and partners' leadership pivoting towards resource investments and new technical enablement plans for 2019 that can better align with and accelerate partner requirements.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My charter is to drive IoT technical enablement for US Scale Partners. For a truly exceptional year, my goal is to accelerate the TTM for IoT solutions sold by our partners to their customers. Basically, I need to remove the time intensive paths our partners spend wading through the complex IoT ecosystem by pointing them to known interoperable solution ingredients and companies. To achieve speed goals, I have an identified strategy and set of tactics to simultaneously align Partner's Business interests, GTM, and Technology strengths in an integrated plan and to win in 2019, I need to insure we implement them.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? IoT is exceptionally complex and it takes a community across the ecosystem to develop and deploy an IoT solution. There are several required building blocks with many attributes, multiple supply chains and companies, and a set of interdisciplinary skills needed to create an integrated IoT solution. The key for success is demystifying the complexity into actionable pathways through technical decomposition and business relationships so that the industry can leverage IoT to provide business value to solve end-customer problems. My trusted advisor role for Intel's US Channel is to influence and drive an accelerated IoT journey for Scale with our Partners.

Paula Wessells

U.S. Channel Engagement Manager

Intel

Wessels leads, defines and drives U.S. channel engagement strategy that supports annual revenue of $6 billion for the channel businesses, products and initiatives through the Intel Technology Partner program.

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 13

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Driving brand positioning, membership benefit planning, overseeing sales enablement content and training requirements.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Reducing program complexity and increasing the 'ease of doing business' remains a key focus for us. While one-off escalations are relatively easy to resolve; we are investing in process and tool improvements to improve this at a systemic level.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Communication - we must improve our ability to really listen to and clearly understand our partners.

Irina Shamkova

SVP, Product Management

Intermedia

Shamkova and her team ensure that Intermedia’s new UCaaS solution, Intermedia Unite, is easy for partners to sell, deploy and support. She leads the development of this feature-rich product that affords SMBs the flexibility to communicate how they want.

Years In Position: 6

Years In Channel: 18

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I am so passionate about what we do here at Intermedia, and how we are helping to transform the way partners can succeed in the cloud, that I want to tell the world. Well, at a minimum, partners. This includes delivering keynotes at channel conferences around the future of the UCaaS market, and why it is such a massive opportunity for partners. My energy and excitement are real, and I do what I can to communicate that in the presentations and discussions I give. I also realize how critical it is to inform partners of what Unite offers, how to position it, and what additional features are planned in the coming months. So I conduct numerous webinars with partners to do just that, and these efforts appear to be paying dividends. Working closely with channel sales and marketing, Intermedia UCaaS growth in 2018 increased by ~30%...and this was driven in large part by a brand new product - Intermedia Unite!

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Grow, grow, and grow! At Intermedia, we say it's not just about the margins partners make, but the profit they keep. This can't be done if partners are constantly servicing the products, repeatedly trying to help customers understand unnecessarily complicated bills, and/or dealing with complex taxation issues. Product development at Intermedia works to ensure that Unite, from before the sale to after the sale, mitigates these issues, and delivers an easy to sell, easy to support experience that allows partners to focus on selling, and not efforts that cut into margins and profit.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? It's not a matter of if, but when -- and to which provider -- a business will move its telecom and related services to the cloud. For partners looking for a UCaaS product built with SMBs in mind, one that is feature-rich, highly reliable and secure, and provides terrific margins -- up to 50 percent, Unite is it. We built Unite to help partners tap into the massive, and growing, UCaaS market. And thanks to our friends in marketing and sales and support, we surround our partners with everything they need to help accelerate their success.

Helda Lopes

VP, Global Market Programs, Marketing

Juniper Networks

Lopes revamped Juniper’s Partner Program to adapt to market changes that impact partners. These changes are redesigned to maximize partner profitability and drive product specialization. She also redesigned the Partner Marketing platform.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 16

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? The industry continues to evolve, and as manufacturers, we have the responsibility to help our partners be as effective as possible and to ensure that they can take advantage of the changing environment. To this end, I have made some changes to Juniper's Partner Program to adapt to market changes which impact our partners. These changes are redesigned to maximize partner profitability and drive product specialization. Additionally, I have redesigned Juniper's Partner Marketing platform â€“ Partner Marketing Central â€“ which provides partners the tools and the messaging they need to align their marketing with Juniper while providing them the agility and flexibility to customize to meet their needs.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goals for Juniper's channel business over the next year are to invest in partners who want to invest and grow with us. The Juniper Partner Advantage Program has set a strong foundation for partner profitability on products as well as on value-added opportunities and end-to-end customer engagement. I am also recruiting and nurturing new partners in next generation technologies such as Software and Cloud.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? As customers shift from on-premise to cloud, partners need to shift from transactional business to recurring revenue models. Additionally, we encourage our partners to invest in customer success to increase their margins by upselling and cross-selling while retaining customers and enhancing their position in the market.

Nicole Evans Roskill

Executive Director, Worldwide Channel Chief

Lenovo

Evans Roskill joined Lenovo in February 2019, and her focus is to enhance, elevate and accelerate the Data Center Group’s engagement with channel partners to drive consistent value to partners and customers globally.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Having recently been hired at Lenovo, my 2019 focus is to enhance, elevate and accelerate the Data Center Group (DCG)'s engagement with channel partners to drive consistent value to our partners and customers globally.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Lenovo DCG continues to demonstrate investment and commitment to significantly grow our business through the channel globally in 2019. My appointment is evidence of this commitment to increase our channel engagement globally to drive value to our partners and customers.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In 2019, the key for our channel partners is to leverage Lenovo's solutions investment in high growth markets. Lenovo DCG's solutions portfolio, coupled with the extensive capabilities of our channel partners, is a competitive advantage that solves customer challenges. We aim to be our channel's data center partner of choice.

Stacey Goodman

Director, North America Channel Programs

Lenovo

Goodman emphasized the customer experience, greater customer engagement and quick resolution, resulting in increased partner satisfaction by implementing feedback that led to greater simplification of the program stack.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the past year as the Director of Lenovo's Channel Programs, I have infused a more sales focused approach into how we plan, develop and execute our partner programs that allows for partners to earn more as they grow their sales with Lenovo. In support of Lenovo's Channel growth, it was important for me to view our incentive portfolio through the lens of a Partner. "How will our program stack impact the partner sales rep? "Will the partner business owner or executive find changes easy to interpret and implement?"" In order to address these questions, I challenged my team to better understand partner's individual business models, aligning mutual priorities and creating joint initiatives to achieve their goals. This feedback was consolidated and incorporated into our planning processes resulting in a suite of earnings based incentives that were both meaningful and relevant. Further, It was important to me that partners knew I was accessible, ensuring questions and concerns were heard and addressed quickly. Beyond driving mutual business growth, establishing a trusted relationship and a clear communication cadence is, and will continue to be a key focus.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goals for our channel business are relationships and expansion. To strengthen our partner relationships even further, we need to stay relevant and clearly understand their business needs. We must work in alignment to help to solve customer problems together. Additionally, we must continue our mission to provide programs that are simple, consistent, profitable, and predictable while providing best in class customer experience. To sustain our accelerated growth we must continue to transform our channel business. I will focus on ways to expand our VAR base by acquiring net new partners as well as re-activating our dormant partners.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for our channel partners in 2019 will be for us to continue to listen to our partners and remain relevant. We will maintain our commitment for our programs to be simple, consistent, profitable and predictable. We will continue the effective work we have begun earlier this year with the engagement between our partners and our Lenovo salesforce. The success we are seeing has lead us to an all-time high of net new customer acquisitions, which could not have been possible without our strong partner community.

Kim Johnson

Director, North America Channel Communities

Lenovo

Johnson led the introduction of a new suite of incentives that provide a clear growth path for all partners. She simplified how the company executes deal registration based on Advisory Council feedback and introduced segment-based partner communities.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 4

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? This past year, the Lenovo channel team implemented a transformation project to drive change in how we interact, enable, and engage our partners. I have been a key advocate for that change and implemented changes to how we tell our story and solutions to key customer groups, specifically K12, Large Enterprise, and SMB. It has been about simplifying our messages, aligning with our partner's business goals, and executing with speed. Through this approach, we have focused on rising above the clutter and barrage of information to deliver how together, Lenovo and our Partners, bring real solutions to our mutual customers. We operate as a single channel team. We believe that we need to constantly earn our Partner's business. As such, my personal contributions are to the team and helping lead how we change and adapt to the needs of our mutual customers. Together our results are reflected in the loyalty we hope to gain and solutions we provide to our customers.

What ar re your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? There are a number of connection points that require coordination to effectively drive channel engagement. We view how we provide partner coverage, incentive programs, tools, and joint marketing as a tightly integrated engagement model for our channel. Each of these coexist to deliver value to each partner regardless of size or geographic reach. Over the next year, I will drive these connections to ensure that our partner enablement is best in class. How we evolve engagement can and will be a competitive differentiator for Lenovo and I will lead these efforts within our North American Channel Team.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? For Lenovo and our channel partners to continue to be successful, we must continue to provide best in class product, service and support for our mutual customers. We must continue to remain relevant with our mutual SMB, Enterprise and Public Sector customers by providing excellent partner and customer experience.

Chari Rhoades

Director, Channel Sales, Distribution, Americas

McAfee

Rhoades’ most notable accomplishment was leading new business demand generation initiatives via McAfee’s channel that delivered new business and expanded market share

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Responsible for internal executive level communications that helped spotlight NNL success, market share expansion and ROI across major channel investments.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? 1.) Simplification of our Channel Corporate Strategy 2.) Simplification of the McAfee Partner Program 3.) Double-digit Year over Year growth 4.) Customer retention and expansion of the McAfee MVISION Platform.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? 1.) The redesign of the McAfee Partner Program 2.) Together with our partners we have to win in cloud security. It's up to us and our partners to deliver the products and services that customers depend on to work efficiently and succeed.

Gretchen O'Hara

VP, Go-To-Market Strategy, U.S. One Commercial Partner

Microsoft

O’Hara led the partner-centric organization to drive go-to-market strategies. She also simplified partner engagement with Microsoft’s field organization and invested significant dollars in partner incentives and new offers.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? 1. Led a partner centric organization to focus on end-to-end partner success through readiness, co-selling and go-to-market strategy. 2. Launched GTM programs for all levels of partner engagement to support the launch and growth of partners' practices & products to drive accelerated revenue & profitability. 3. Developed lead flow engine to support demand gen activities and lead passing to partners for greater opportunities and deal growth. 4. Invested in deep technical and architect resources to better enable and upskill partners on future technologies and support sales engagements. 5. Simplified partner engagement with Microsoft field organization to enable better co-selling and joint GTM. 6. Invested significant dollars in partner incentives and new offers to reach and benefit more partners across the ecosystem.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Digital transformation is driving every company to re-evaluate how they compete. From empowering employees to developing new business models, customers are seeking consulting, cloud and connected digital experiences. In the coming year, we will support our partner ecosystem through this transformation with cloud workshops, Digital Transformation Days and extensive joint training. Our goal is to equip partners to lead the Digital Transformation with us together as part of our joint selling, GTM and deployment strategies.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? There are 5 simple keys to success with Microsoft that can strengthen any partner's channel strategy: 1. Identify, train and build sales & technical expertise in cloud enabled business. 2. Build recurring revenue model to drive usage and consumption of your IP/Services. 3. Define route to market and drive clarity on your value prop and target customers to co-sell with Microsoft. 4. Build a partnership ecosystem (P2P) to extend your sales reach with new customers. 5. Leverage all programs, resources and investments from Microsoft and align with the goals of Microsoft's sellers.

Penny Philpot

VP, Worldwide, One Commercial Partner

Microsoft

Philpott developed and rolled out the Emerging Markets Partner model that enables sustainable revenue growth through a scaled partner model. She also helped establish a more committed relationship with a number of top global ISVs.

Years In Position: 0.5

Years In Channel: 29

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Developed and rolled out the Emerging Markets Partner model that enables sustainable revenue growth through a scaled Partner model. Helped establish a more commitment relationship with a number of top global ISVs Developed a tighter regional internal engagement and alignment to the partnering business to accelerate partner ROI Supported and executed the One Commercial Partner top priorities within the corporate and field teams.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? To leverage partners to meet the companies mission: To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Focus on developing, with Microsoft technology, powerful solutions to solve customer business challenges.

Gavriella Schuster

Corporate VP, One Commercial Partner

Microsoft

In the past year, Schuster’s goal has been to help bring partners to market through co-selling and Microsoft’s marketplace. She and her organization have made great strides in helping partners reach their potential for growth and innovation.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 23

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? We've seen some great momentum in Microsoft's channel that I'm incredibly proud of. The co-sell program we launched just 18 months ago has generated $8 billion in partner revenue; up from $5 billion for the whole of last year last July. We've found, when co-sell partners are involved, deals close nearly 3 times faster, projects are nearly 6 times larger, and Azure consumption is 6 times higher. We've also seen tremendous success with the Azure Expert MSP program announced at the last Inspire conference -- we're now up to 43 partners driving more than $100K per month, and some up to $2 million a month. We are also focusing more than ever on selling partner third-party products through Microsoft. With our enormous partner ecosystem, Microsoft is positioned to build the industry's largest commercial marketplace the world has ever seen. This year we've connected our marketplace to our CSP channel, enabling ISVs that publish their solutions to our marketplace to have direct unfettered access to our entire ecosystem. We see our marketplace is the entry point for partners to co-sell with Microsoft, and the fastest way for partner solutions to be seen by more than a billion targeted customers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? One of our biggest priorities is making it easier for IP builders to create solutions, their way -- on a secure, trusted, and complete cloud platform -- and to get these solutions to market faster than ever before. Forrester predicts that in the next two years, enterprise adoption of online marketplaces will skyrocket from 29% to 75%, and Microsoft is positioned to build the industry's largest commercial marketplace in the world. This year, we're going bigger and better by enabling ISVs that publish their solutions to our marketplace with unfettered access to our entire ecosystem.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? While there's no "one-size-fits-all" option for the channel, we believe partners that prioritize customer obsession are setting themselves up for success. Modern partners that stand out to us are the ones developing their own IP, providing integrated cloud and infrastructure offerings, utilizing industry and domain experts to create richer customer relationships, and capitalizing on data. Since literally everything generates data, it's one of the most valuable assets to customers. It's the currency of the future, and partners need to take advantage of this huge opportunity.

Tricia Jennett

Director, Americas Channel Marketing

NetApp

NetApp entered the fiscal year with a partner-led strategy to expand the commercial business via the channel. Jennett launched a NetApp-led demand generation program for passing leads to partners to drive incremental commercial business at scale.

Years In Position: 3.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? My focus this year was constructing and operationalizing the company's demand generation program for passing leads to partners for the Americas, with the goal of driving incremental commercial opportunities to resellers and solution providers. In addition, I continued to drive our Data Visionary campaign, positioning NetApp as being the Data Authority in the Hybrid Cloud to our partners. I and my team helped amplify and enable strategic partners through the creation and launch of the inaugural Americas partner conference- Channel Connect Conference (C3), while bringing together partners from 5 countries across the Americas.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Next year's focus is to help partners' marketing capabilities with customer-centric data and tools to help partners expand into current customer base and reach new buyers with NetApp's Data Fabric technology and multi-hybrid cloud solutions.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Channel partners need to stay current on today's digital transformation and how those changes impact their customers and prospects. Partners need to prepare for how they transform their organization and business model to capitalize on the growth that can be gained. Partners should stay connected with their distributors and vendors and align to those growth areas. Leverage vendor and distributor's for information, industry reports, tools and assets to market jointly together.

Betsey Pashayan

Director, Worldwide Partner Marketing

NetApp

Pashayan focused the team on the development of sales toolkits aligned with the rollout of companion partner-led demand generation campaigns. This let partners enable their sellers prior to the execution of their NetApp-focused demand campaigns.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 14

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? My focus in 2018 was to make it easier for partners to collaborate across our ecosystem and drive demand across our expanded solution portfolio. We focused on optimizing launch and campaign packaging for partners, including building integrated standardized set of resources across multiple solutions as part of a bi-annual cross portfolio launch. We drove improved field and partner awareness prior to launch through a series of advance web-based trainings. We focused on sales tools and demand generation campaign messaging on business outcomes based on partner feedback. I led an initiative to increase understanding of the channel business across Marketing by bringing channel industry experts together with our teams in cross-functional workshops on delivering messaging, content and tools for partners. I focused on increasing digital content and social outreach including the expansion of social content in our partner-led campaigns as well as the rollout of a corporate platform for social content syndication. Increasing partner-led demand generation was a key priority in 2018. We expanded content across our multi-tool platform, offering more customizable, solution-based programs with the addition of templated campaign execution guides to support Partner campaign customization. Partner execution of demand gen programs targeted to increase 20% Y/Y

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? 1. Accelerate Partner Growth: Increase lead passing, provide resources to target new buying centers, activate partners to sell broader portfolio of solutions by targeting new markets, and support partners with install campaigns to discover incremental workloads in key accounts. 2. Increase Partner Independence: Empower Distributors to deliver partner-led sales. Build tools targeting a velocity business, create resources needed to identify and penetrate partner-led commercial accounts. Capture new customers with increased demand for our Flash, Converged Infrastructure and Cloud solutions. 3. Improve Partner Experience: Create new tools, improve platforms and communications, and deliver predictable materials across our expanding portfolio.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Run toward the unknown. Embrace transformation and accept / adopt the tools vendors are developing to help partners target and sell solutions differently. Prepare the business for new revenue models, even at the short-term risk of cannibalizing a percentage of the revenue base. Understand where hybrid cloud solution offerings fit best into the GTM and integrate it into their marketing and sales efforts.

Jennifer Bodell

VP, Channel

Pax8

Bodell is responsible for Pax8’s field marketing strategy. In her role, she develops and manages key IT channel relationships, including new growth opportunities and the company’s partner program. She and her team helped Pax8 reach 5,500 partners.

Years In Position: 2.5

Years In Channel: 7

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I am fortunate to work for a company that understands the importance and value of having a comprehensive field marketing strategy. Further, the leadership team completely trusts me to build it. Throughout my career in the IT channel, I have been involved and continue follow the different communities and networks so we can understand how partners' businesses are growing and changing, which I believe is imperative to our success as an organization. As the trusted advocate, I always show up to listen and deliver the Pax8 story. With more than 5,500 partners, we are adding new MSPs at a rate of 350+ per month. This growth is partly attributed to the constant contact we have with channel partners at events and involvement with the channel communities. To ensure our success, I also work alongside our VP of Marketing to create and build expo strategies so we maximize our impact at each conference. What I am most proud of in 2018 is the "WingWoman" movement that I started and led. At Pax8, we built branding campaigns around #WingWoman, designed merchandise, stickers, and more. Our success is attributed to this team's dynamic creativity, hard-work, and focus.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? In 2019, I will continue to grow our partner base in the US through our field marketing strategy, as well as expand our footprint internationally. In conjunction with Pax8's CRO, I am building a go-to-market field strategy for global expansion, starting with EMEA and APEC. We are also focused on enabling our partners to optimize their customer base. We are making is easy for partners to build technology stacks and grow with Pax8 Stax, our BI tool, and through 24 Mission briefing events across the US where we are offer hands-on training, education, and more.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The best part about Pax8 is our focus on the partners. We are built by and for our partners. Their success is our success. We know partners can buy product anywhere, but at Pax8 we are selling more than product. We sell our serviceâ€¦ the Wingman experience. We also back that experience with incredible technology to enable our partners to build their profitability and become more operationally efficient.

Monique Rezaei

Director, Channels, North America

Poly

Rezai played an integral part in the overall success of the channel organization in 2018. She grew her team of partners year over year through very strategic, prescriptive growth initiatives that led to the overall growth success of the company and its partners.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 9

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Monique played an integral part in the overall success of Polycom's channel organization in 2018. She grew her team of partners YoY through very strategic, prescriptive growth initiatives that led to the overall joint success of Polycom and the partners. Monique was also involved in assisting in the development of new channel strategies, programs and initiatives that will be delivered in 2019.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? With the acquisition of Polycom by Plantronics, we are very focused on the development of a new joint partner program, strategy for the organization moving forward and overall growth and development of the channel partners.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Relevance to their customers. The UC industry is ever-changing and our customers are challenging us more than ever. They have to be focused on their strengths and deliver strong solutions that meet our customers needs.

Kristina Onyon

Director, Worldwide Partner Marketing

Puppet

Onyon has contributed to Puppet’s channel success by being highly focused on how to support a partner-centric model. She has developed strategic partner marketing relationships, built joint campaigns and introduced more incentive programs.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Through my partner relationships and marketing leadership. We built and executed new incentive programs resulting in better margins. We engaged our strategic alliance partners to build and support joint marketing campaigns. We leveraged these campaigns with and through our joint channel partners. Most recently, we launched a joint awareness campaign with Splunk highlighting our better together story. This campaign ties into another new incentive program we just rolled out. I drive joint solutions and engage with our ecosystem to bring value to our customers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? With an expanded product portfolio that positions Puppet in new markets, the channel team is looking to accelerate revenue growth for its partners by expanding business opportunities into existing customer accounts with new Puppet products and leveraging solution-based sales plays with its joint technology partners to offer more robust customer solutions. Puppet is heavily invested in new tools and resources that continue to develop and execute partner ready campaigns.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In order for enterprises to grow and thrive, they need to eliminate the manual, error-prone, and soul-crushing parts of their software delivery process and standardize their processes for getting software in the hands of customers. Puppet's product portfolio provides this across the IT team's entire estate - from mainframes to containers running in the cloud. When partners leverage the value of Puppet's products, they capture market demand on what is currently happening with IT and capitalize on the growth opportunities as well.

Muffin Mott

Head of Global Partner Marketing

Pure Storage

Mott expanded the partner marketing organization’s responsibilities to better support sales go-to-market initiatives and partner readiness programs. This encompassed adding staff and support, with partner experience always top of mind.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 24

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Since joining Pure, my focus has been on expanding and aligning the team to activate routes to market. With an emphasis on how we scale and build out the right goals, programs, and systems to drive joint partner success this next year. However, I think it is important to recognize my team's collective achievements in the last year. This past year the team focused on partner readiness and launched an Always On webinar program to increase engagement by delivering relevant content and allowing partners to easily share technology and partnership solutions with customers. With the team's continued focus on engaging our partners this past year, the team launched a new Global Partner Technical Advisory Council. For much of last year, I was Head the Global Channel Marketing at Symantec. I focused the team on improving our overall partner experience with Symantec. The key was enhancing our partner portal user experience, aligning the MDF program and guidelines to support key business initiatives and lastly, launching a digital tool kit, which allowed partners to easily access content and marketing materials. We also expanded our relationships with cloud partners.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My top goals are to create an outstanding partner experience and build the right marketing mix to help accelerate our partners' businesses with an emphasis on partner readiness. While remaining 100% partner centric, we will extend our routes to market this year and also expand our portfolio of solutions. With this expansion, we will release an evolution of new programs to develop joint marketing solutions that support collaborative solution selling to/thru and with our partners. We will continue our focus on empowering our partners through tools and solutions that make it easier to do business with Pure Storage.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key for partners is to market and sell holistic solutions. Customers have an overload of data and it is crucial for partners to put this data at the core when they implement new infrastructure and help customers take advantage of the insights this data can bring their organizations. It's also important for partners to always be learning and provide expertise in AI, NVMe, and the hybrid cloud as more companies are driving IT teams to be innovative yet agile with their applications and infrastructure.

Margaret-Ann Bolton

Sr. Director, Global Partner Marketing

Red Hat

Bolton played a key role in furthering Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy. Strategic partners are now delivering new technology and solutions for their customers that include Red Hat technologies.

Years In Position: 8

Years In Channel: 19

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the past year, I helped spearhead a number of initiatives that have advanced Red Hat's channel business. To start, we increased awareness of the programs and benefits available to partners, leading to better field alignment on end-to-end marketing efforts. In addition, we made Red Hat's marketing assets aligned to our campaign strategies available to a broader set of partners, including scalable demand generation tools and sales enablement programs. Red Hat also implemented a corporate strategic initiative designed to unify the partner experience. This is a simplified and progressive set of capabilities that enable new and expanded product, solutions and services opportunities for all kinds of partners to accelerate their business with Red Hat.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My team and I plan to do more with targeted strategic partners to amplify awareness for co-engineered solutions with market leaders and the next generation of Open Hybrid Cloud partners. Whether the partner delivers an on-premise solution or in the cloud, our strategy provides customers with a seamless way to acquire our technology. We also have several upcoming launches this year to which partners are contributing including support for Red Hat's expanding Open Hybrid Cloud technologies, and the newest RHEL 8 beta.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In 2019, partners should look to find new ways to apply open source technology to new workloads, opportunities, challenges - particularly by using machine learning and data science automation to create efficiencies and make better business decisions.

Terri Hall

Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances

Red Hat

Terri Hall is vice president of Global Partners and Alliances at Red Hat. She is responsible for driving strategy and revenue growth through the Red Hat OEM, GSI, ISV and Cloud partner ecosystems.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 13

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Beyond driving quarterly business results, Terri's organization is focused on driving strategic joint initiatives and solutions with key partners for the Open Hybrid Cloud. In collaboration with key Red Hat technical and business stakeholders, Terri's team works with industry-leading partners to drive joint technology innovations for Red Hat customers. Public announcements of these joint initiatives over the past 12 months include Microsoft and Red Hat introducing the first jointly managed OpenShift offering in the Azure public cloud and IBM and Red Hat announcing IBM Cloud Private and IBM middleware offerings on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as Red Hat certified containers. Over the past year, Terri's team also drove significant investment of industry leading global systems integrators in building Red Hat capabilities, delivery practices and solutions including Accenture's adoption of OpenShift Container Platform as the basis for their Accenture DevOps Platform (ADOP), and DXC's announcement of the DXC Managed Container Platform as a Service (PaaS) powered by Red Hat OpenShift. Through her team's efforts, Red Hat has launched over 30 joint solutions with systems integrator partners based on Red Hat's emerging technologies portfolio for the Open Hybrid Cloud.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Terri's goals for partner business in FY20 are to continue to grow the business at above market rates across all four partner ecosystems. Key FY20 objectives are to continue to increase the revenue mix of strategic and emerging products through partners; drive more joint innovation and solutions with partners for the Open Hybrid Cloud; and grow partner satisfaction and preference for Red Hat by continually evolving our culture, programs, and engagement to drive mutual success.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Our customers' migration to the cloud is driving fundamental changes to our partners' business models, which must evolve and adapt to respond to the changing opportunity landscape. Traditional hardware partners are now offering "composable" platforms allowing customers to use and pay for only those features of the system that they deploy. All partner types are evolving to "everything as a service" and consumption based pricing for both cloud and on premise solutions. The key to our partners' success is their agility and responsiveness to their customers in this fast changing market.

Lisa Del Real

AVP, Global Channel Programs, Operations

RingCentral

Del Real has been leading the channel programs and operations team at RingCentral since its inception. She has seen the channel continue to grow each year and witnessed the exceptional results of RingCentral’s continued global expansion.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 8

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the past year, I directly influenced my company's channel business by continuing to expand its global footprint in APAC and EMEA, handling all programmatic and operational development aspects. Through this global expansion, my channel programs and operations team supported the largest revenue growth for channel contributions in company history, completing last quarter with an ARR of over $180 million in Q4, representing an 80% YoY growth now partners are winning even more with RingCentral. Programmatically, I developed unique ways to increase partner demand generation. Our world-class partner program continues to have a relentless focus on the overall partner journey through training, enablement, and increasing awareness through concierge marketing, events, and communications, such as, partner customer forums, webinars, campaigns-in-a-box, and sales engineer bootcamps. All of these programs are at no cost to the partner and their commissions remain whole. These programs, fully supported and funded by RingCentral, have brought us incredible results executing 23 global channel educational events through Partner Academies and countless industry events. As a dedicated channel champion, my team and I have helped scale the company's partner program to more than 9,000 channel partners worldwide, adding almost 2,000 partners in 2018.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? The key to driving success for the channel this year will be through our creation of the RingCentral Champion program. RingCentral fondly refers to 2018 as the "year of the national partners." 2019, however, is the year we will execute this partner expansion by enabling partners programmatically and operationally to increase sales. With an innovative focus on enhancing the overall partner journey, branding, and social selling, I predict 2019 will far surpass our achievements in 2018.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for RingCentral Channel Partners is to bring us qualified leads. RingCentral makes it easy for partners to drive sales with access to our world-class partner program, including a top-notch partner only support, and our brilliant Channel Harmony:â„¢ One to Infinity program. This has been the most successful program to date. The partner receives 100% compensation for the life of the contract, all while eliminating potential conflict between the channel and direct sales. RingCentral also provides subject-matter experts (SMEs) to help partners close deals of any size-it's a win for everyone.

Bridget Bisnette

SVP, Global Partner Sales

Riverbed

Bisnette rolled out the Riverbed Rise partner program, which challenged conventional competency-based program structures and revolutionized how Riverbed valued and structured partner incentives. She also implemented a plan to recognize and reward partner-initiated bookings.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 31

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Delivered a program with more external awards and external recognitions than Riverbed has every received in their 15 year history. The Channelnomics Innovation Awards (CIAs) recognized Riverbed Rise with the 2018 Channel Transformation Award from Riverbed Rise was recognized with CRN 5 Star Best in Class Program Award in 2018 ESG Channel Acceleration Program Innovation Award in 2018. SiriusDecisions recognized Riverbed Reach, the Riverbed Rise with Program of the Year award. 2. Developed a way to measure and reward Partner Initiated Business by influencing a mindset change to our sales org, enabled through SDFC system enhancements which automate the process. We grew our Partner Initiated business to 19% of our bookings globally and specifically 41% of our Commercial business was Partner Initiated in 2018. 3. Through EODB changes enabled by our SFDC Communities implementation we: Grew bookings via our channel partners 3% y/y 8% more partners actively booked business in 2018 300% more partners earned rewards 253% more partner center unique users400+ certifications & 5000+ accreditations were earned 2000% increase of pages viewed at our new partner portal.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Build out digital experience management (DEM) partner capability and capacity to support 100% bookings growth year over year. Build SD Wan capability with existing Rise partners to capture market share and secure challenger position in magic quadrant. Increase partner initiated business to 25% globally.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The ability to transition from transactional resale model to delivering managed, cloud and PS services that deliver a customer outcome.

Michelle Pas

Director, Channel Marketing, Global Programs

RSA

To communicate more efficiently with all partners on a global basis, Pas simplified and modernized RSA’s regular cadence of communications and modified the global partner program to make it easier to do business with RSA.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In the past several months, I have reorganized my team to focus on RSA partners in a more strategic manner which will carry into this coming year. In an effort to communicate more efficiently with all of our partners on a global basis, we have simplified and modernized our regular cadence of communications. We have modified our global partner program to make it easier to do business with RSA to help drive more marketing activities. We realized in order to reach more RSA global partners we needed to analyze the capabilities of our partner set to be more successful in the coming year.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? This year we are taking a two-pronged approach where we are altering our custom marketing support for our top partners and distributors and we are offering the rest of our partners carte blanche to multiple campaigns within our marketing platform called Partner Marketing Center to help increase channel leads which in turn will help meet the sales goals. The keys to success this year will also be in promoting solutions through our partners and distributors which will include RSA products, multiple vendors (if necessary) and partner services.

Diane Guthmann

Global Channel Marketing Director

Ruckus Networks, an Arris Company

Guthmann focused on initiatives to increase partner engagement. More partners are now selling across the portfolio, adopting new cloud-based solutions, and working with Ruckus to increase market share in key verticals

Years In Position: 3.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Ruckus is a channel-focused company with close to 100% of our sales going through partners. Our commitment to the channel has not wavered through several acquisitions over the past few years, and our partners continue to be key to our success. My role driving partner awareness, engagement and marketing enablement is critical to supporting partner success. Over the past year, I've developed and implemented several engagement initiatives to be more targeted in our outreach to different partner audiences. This resulted in an attendance increase in our partner webinar series, as well as greater open and click-through rates for newsletters and other communications. I also spearheaded a redesign and content refresh of our partner portal which increased both the number of new users and document downloads. In parallel, I developed and launched new vertical and solution-specific marketing tool kits that provide our partners with the content, assets, messaging to enable them to grow their business with us through awareness and demand generation in key market segments. Lastly, I managed development and execution of Ruckus's first global partner satisfaction survey which provided the company with insights and actionable recommendations for our business strategy heading into 2019.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My top goals are to continue to increase the partner community's awareness of Ruckus and our world-class connectivity solutions with a focus on providing marketing resources that enable partners to lead with software and services, and accelerate our drive into key market segments. We will focus, as well, on recruiting partners that are specialized in delivering services solutions and/or have vertical expertise, and there will be an ongoing priority to increase partner engagement on all levels.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? First, if they haven't done so already, partners must transition to a services business model, selling subscription-based solutions that deliver recurring revenue. Companies and enterprises of all sizes want data, applications and services delivered from the cloud and channel partners will be left behind if they don't adapt to this business model. Second, awesome customer service will never go out of style! Building relationships, listening to customers and being easy to do business with is critical for success.

Raelyn Kritzer

Channel Chief, VP, Worldwide Channels

Ruckus Networks, an Arris Company

This past year, Ruckus wanted to help partners have a cloud-based Wi-Fi management tool, so Kritzer introduced the new Cloud-Ready Specialization. Through this designation, partners have the resources to win cloud Wi-Fi sales.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In 2018, we wanted to address a growing need within our partner community to address cloud Wi-Fi management. We introduced the new Cloud-Ready Specialization, which is designed to equip channel partners with resources to win cloud Wi-Fi sales. My team and I conceptualized and launched the Cloud-Ready program to make understanding cloud Wi-Fi easier for our partners by providing engineering and tech support to new partners who joined. We also help our partners differentiate themselves against the competition by providing a Ruckus Networks Cloud Specialization badge, as well as MDF to help offset the cost of a new business investment.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My top goals are to add more qualified partners, as well as help partners migrate to the cloud and managed service solutions through focused training, sell-with opportunities leveraging our strong Alliances community. Additionally, I want to launch complementary programs that recognize and reward partners for their skills in those models.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Partners who worked closely with us in 2018 saw roughly 30% revenue growth year over year. The key to success is to continue to work closely with our teams and leverage our tools and programs, as we are heavily invested in our channel. Also, partners should continue to invest in managed services, generating increased partner loyalty, and drive more solution-selling with the complimentary alliance programs and relationships we have in place.

Leslie Tom

SVP, AppExchange Marketing, Programs

Salesforce

Tom led multiple launches on AppExchange, continued to grow the Trailhead learning platform, and launched ISV technology to help partners build new revenue streams with Salesforce solutions.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 16

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? This year, we launched a new intelligent search and recommendations for partner apps on AppExchange, delivering greater awareness and demand for partner apps. We launched integrated Trailhead Learning into AppExchange pages to drive more awareness and demand for partner apps. We created new AppExchange collections for customers with partner apps, including Quip Live Apps, Lightning Data, Community Templates and Lightning Flows for targeted marketing of partner apps. Another success for the company was the general availability of Trailblazer Scorecard, which delivers a holistic view of every partner's business with Salesforce with enablement resources to increase their score across 9 different categories. We wrapped up the year with the launch of ISV technology for partners to help them build new revenue streams with Quip solutions, Lightning Flows, Integration solutions (Mulesoft) and Einstein Analytics. We also launched a checkout and payment method expansion for partners, New Channel Order App, which delivers a modern, easy-to-use, intuitive order process to optimize order errors and increase partner productivity. Finally, we debuted a smarter AppExchange with intelligent recommendations and guided learning, and announced new partner analytics which will provide partners with deeper insights to make better business and marketing decisions.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Our plan for the channel business is all about making it easier to do business with Salesforce. I plan to further streamline the onboarding process for our partners and create easy-to-consume journeys for partners to build their app and go to market. I will create additional clarity and transparency with our partner ecosystem through in person partner events, quarterly partner executive briefings and quarterly focus groups. I am continuing a focus on partner apps by industries that will drive great partner success and customer success.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for our channel partners is committed partnership. We have a motto on how we work with our partners: "We succeed when you succeed." We view our partners as a true member of our Salesforce Ohana â€” we work together for joint success. Together, our partnerships will leverage intelligence and will focus on success within key industries like finance, retail and healthcare to drive customer success in 2019 and beyond.

Jennifer Pointer

Acting Head of B2B Mobile Marketing

Samsung Electronics America

Pointer has led the channel marketing team in developing a stronger partner investment strategy and planning process, creating transparency, joint ownership and accountability.

Years In Position: 0.3

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I personally met with many of our partners to discuss business and marketing strategies throughout 2018. I worked with our partners and my channel marketing team to understand the challenges and improve our joint marketing and planning process. In some cases this resulted in hiring new talent with channel expertise. In other cases it involved aligning investment with business priorities and educating on activities that would drive growth. Providing partners tools to support them in their business development and co-marketing is a critical priority. I've worked to ensure we are providing our partners valuable content and co-marketing resources through ready-made campaigns and materials. In addition, I've we have introduced tools supported with promotions and investments to ensure our partner ecosystem has the proper resources to market mobile solutions. I've bolstered this with additional resources made available to our partners to assist in campaign development, execution and reporting. We're excited to expand on this work in 2019.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? In 2019 we'll be launching a new partner relationship management platform. Improving the collaboration and communication with our partners is a big priority and this new platform will enable us to provide an elevated experience, making it easier for our partners to engage with our channel team providing the structure to support our mutual business growth. In addition, we'll be improving our program framework to improve our benefits structure in a way that prioritizes joint planning with a focus on results.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Technology innovation is evolving more rapidly than ever before. Mobility is at the forefront of that innovation and it's becoming more powerful with AI, IoT and 5G. It's critical that our partners develop mobility practices enabling them to leverage all of the technology capabilities that are available to growing businesses improving TCO and productivity and improving operations through workplace transformation.

Shannon Platz

Global VP, ISV Go-To-Market, Business Development

SAP

Platz designed a corporatewide ISV strategy: “Build with the Best.” This is not only a business model, but a commitment to ensure each partner delivers innovative solutions to successfully adapt to dynamic market conditions.

Years In Position: 5

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Transformative innovation is happening in all industries, most of which is driven by the application of technologies into products and solutions. As such, every company is becoming a technology company. It is my responsibility to ensure SAP uniquely addresses this market opportunity in the channel. The ISV profile is expanding to include companies commercializing their intellectual property, those innovating commodity products to service products, and manufacturers building software. During the past year, I have implemented go-to-market and business development programs to drive the SAP product portfolio into the ISV ecosystem and to aggressively expand the size of SAP's ISV ecosystem. Capitalizing on this addressable market requires the commitment to serve and support partners during constant innovation cycles, reinvention of their products, modernization to cloud, opening new markets, and delivering new products. This approach has advanced the channel business through faster time to market; increased revenue growth, market penetration and expansion; accelerated product launch and adoption; growth in the ISV partner base; and intense focus and dedication to partner success. Addressing the ISV market opportunity involves a transformational culture change in the go-to-market approach, product marketing and management, and product development organizations and processes.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goals are threefold: partner success, technology adoption, and ecosystem expansion. They are anchored by ensuring support throughout the partner's innovation journey for rapid time to market and optimized market success of their solutions. With adoption of SAP technology, partners deliver constant innovation, reinvention, modernization, and new products and are able to serve new markets. For ecosystem expansion, I am executing a holistic approach to identify industries, company profiles, and technology investments, including: profiling, recruitment, on-boarding, skills development, business planning, and marketing and sales execution. The focus is an exceptional partner experience designed for their innovation journey and market success.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? To be successful, partners must commit themselves to constant innovation, reinvention, and modernization. They need to identify new markets to penetrate and innovate to create new products that meet customer needs. Additionally, they have to be laser-focused on building an intuitive, real-time user experience for all devices, anytime, anywhere. This is what customers expect in the Intelligent era, and partners need to create a customer experience that transcends innovation. We live in a time of rapid change and, to stay ahead, partners must adapt quickly to dynamic market conditions to keep their competitive advantage.

Meaghan Sullivan

Head of Global Partner Marketing

SAP

Under Sullivan, SAP’s Global Partner Marketing team has developed several strategies to help transform into a digital demand generation engine. These initiatives provide partners with the content and programs they need.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? The SAP channel leadership team is one of the strongest and most aligned organizations in the industry. Our channel sales and marketing teams have made great strides working together to create a seamless, integrated approach around expanding the SAP Partner Economy (which IDC expects to double by 2024) by aggressively supporting the digital transformation of partner businesses across the globe. Specifically, we developed and launched several innovative programs to help partners integrate Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Predictive Analytics solutions into their offerings. These enhancements allow partners to meet changing customer buying journey demands with a marketing-led demand generation engine. We also created new opportunities for partners to increase profitability and expand into new cloud business models with our SAP PartnerEdge Cloud Choice Programs and instilled a "Partner First" philosophy in all our offerings for 18,000+ partners across the globe.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? IDC projects that our partners will generate nearly $200 billion in net-new SAP-related revenue in the next five years, with more than 60% coming from the cloud. IDC also predicts that partners focused on creating and selling their own software in the cloud will grow the fastest -- at a 24% rate until 2023. Moving forward, SAP maintains a strong commitment to developing the innovations and programs necessary for partners to accelerate their growth around creating the Intelligent Enterprise as well as a commitment to create and attract new partner types and business models that expand the SAP Partner Economy.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to our success in 2019 will be to continue to drive acceleration of digital transformation with our partners to the cloud and the Intelligent Enterprise. We are a "Partner First" organization and remain laser focused on creating success and profitability models for our partners. Our mission is to enable our partners to drive deeper into the cloud and leverage the SAP portfolio to bring the Best Run businesses to market on SAP technologies.

Ansley Hoke

SVP, Marketing, North America

ScanSource

Hoke has worked over the past year to educate the channel and those on her team about digital transformation and how, as individuals in the center of channel programs and execution for VARs and suppliers, they are key influencers.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I have personally helped advance ScanSource's channel business by developing many channel programs with education and lead generation elements to advance digital transformation. Developing educational web properties, digital learning options as well as putting together focus groups helped ScanSource offer our partners better ways to communicate to their customers. Leading teams that created new professional service offerings for our partners was key to this, as well as leading our supplier team that pulled the best products in these areas to wrap our service offerings around. Working with our VARs to refresh their customer bases with the newest solutions from ScanSource was also a key growth win.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? I have personally helped advance ScanSource's channel business by developing many channel programs with education and lead generation elements to advance digital transformation. Developing educational web properties, digital learning options as well as putting together focus groups helped ScanSource offer our partners better ways to communicate to their customers. Leading teams that created new professional service offerings for our partners was key to this, as well as leading our supplier team that pulled the best products in these areas to wrap our service offerings around. Working with our VARs to refresh their customer bases with the newest solutions from ScanSource was also a key growth win.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success in 2019 is the flexibility our partners have in their solutions offerings to their customers. They need to have options in the solution mix, in the way it is deployed, consumed and even billed. Those that are the most in tune with what their customers need will have higher close rates.

Dee Dee Acquista

VP, Global Channels

SentinelOne

Acquista launched SenintelOne’s new Global Partner Portal. In addition, she designed and implemented meaningful incentive programs for partner account managers and their systems engineering counterparts.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the last 12 months, Dee Dee worked closely with SentinelOne's top MSSP partner, as it made a move to be acquired by a larger organization. Dee Dee served as a trusted advisor, helping the partner to make the right decision. Dee Dee assisted with drafting a memorandum of understanding (MOU) alongside the new organization and helped them move forward as a team. Post acquisition, this partner is growing faster than ever, as one of the major platforms bringing SentinelOne's next-generation endpoint protection to the broader MSP market.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Focus on a small number of elite partners. Launch new/revamp existing channel program. Launch new certifications and/or partner levels.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success is understanding the ever-evolving endpoint security space - acknowledging that traditional AV is not enough anymore and that customers need to deploy the next generation endpoint protection solution. SentinelOne worked hard to ensure that its partners understand how their customers benefit from the SentinelOne Endpoint Protection Platform, which has resulted in many key wins last year, and will continue doing so in 2019.

Kendra Krause

VP, Global Channels

Sophos

Krause and her team have expanded Sophos’ innovative managed service offerings and training initiatives to fuel growth opportunities for partners. She also developed sales initiatives to support MSP Connect, Synchronized Security accreditation and Cloud Service Provider programs.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the last year, I oversaw the go-to-market strategy and expansion of new innovative managed service offerings and training initiatives developed to fuel and streamline growth opportunities for partners. My team and I worked to enhance Sophos' MSP Connect Program, making it effortless for MSPs to sell, market, distribute and implement its comprehensive next-generation security portfolio for every customer through the centralized management platform, Sophos Central. As a result, the MSP program has become the fastest growing segment within Sophos sales. My team also focused on expanding the Synchronized Security accreditation program, rolling out advanced training and enablement for partners selling the broader Sophos portfolio -- both endpoint and network security products -- and updating its technology to ensure these products work better together. For example, Sophos' competitive intelligence hotline offers information and advice partners can use to close a deal with Sophos solutions. In addition, we spearheaded enhanced product and training initiatives to further support the Cloud Service Provider Program based on direct feedback from partners. Similarly, Sophos' recent acquisition of Avid Secure will allow us to take these new initiatives a step further by incorporating new technologies, offers, and programs to support partners' public cloud sales.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Over the next year, we are focused on expanding the 'Channel Best' philosophy that is at the core of Sophos' channel business. Sophos will be launching enhanced tools for partners and offering easy access to these tools, training, and support teams, to ensure that every partner who joins the Sophos Partner Program has the best experience possible. Sophos will also build out offerings, services, and tools for the MSP Connect Program. In addition, we are streamlining Sophos' partner programs globally, taking the best practices from the US and Western European regions and applying them around the world.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Today's sophisticated threat landscape has a growing number of enterprises depending heavily on the channel to protect them. This is why channel partners must have a thorough understanding of security trends and the threat landscape, in addition to providing layered security by partnering with a security vendor who offers next-generation endpoint, server, network, web and email security solutions that work well together. With Sophos, our partners can confidently build their own cybersecurity portfolio and solidify their reputation with customers as a trusted security advisor.

Erin Malone

VP, North America Channel Sales

Sophos

As leader of Sophos’ Partner Advisory Council, Malone has continued to evolve Sophos’ managed service offerings and initiatives, garnering valuable feedback directly from partners on the next-generation security solutions, support and tools they need.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the past year, Erin ensured partners' voices were incorporated into all product roadmap developments, program updates and communications. Erin focused on growing Sophos' MSP Connect Program, continuing to add new NA partners and working closely with existing partners to help them achieve their business goals. Under Erin's leadership, Sophos' NA channel sales team launched aggressive promotions and incentives to educate partners on the cross-sell opportunities with Sophos Central and XG Firewall. Erin also led the roll out of advanced training and enablement resources, including the expansion of Sophos' synchronized security accreditation program, to make it easier for partners to deliver synchronized security and earn more of their customers' security budget. As a result, synchronized security certifications increased by 40% over the past year. Erin also amplified Sophos' "Break a Hacker's Heart" nationwide roadshow presence, doubling the number of cities in FY19 compared to FY18. These roadshows give partners the ability to learn and demo new products, receive tips on upselling and cross selling products and talk through industry challenges. The continued growth in roadshow attendance is a direct result of the value partners takeaway from these events, which are largely shaped by direct feedback Erin receives from partners.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Erin and her team will continue to focus on strengthening Sophos' MSP Connect Program, as well as further invest in the development of advanced training and enablement initiatives for partners selling the broader Sophos portfolio to fuel growth opportunities and accelerate cross-sales momentum. Over the next year, Erin will also continue working to expand the reach of Sophos' nation-wide roadshows and user groups, bringing the Sophos story to partners in key territories across the United States.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? To be successful in 2019, channel partners will need to focus on managed services, leveraging cloud enabled next-generation security solutions and partnering with vendors like Sophos that support monthly and annual term business models. It will be key for channel partners to work with vendors that have a broad portfolio to allow for land and expand discussions with customers. Creating a security-focused team of sales and technical resources to keep up with the modern-day threats that are impacting customers will also be important to channel partners' success in 2019 and beyond.

Caralyn Stern

Sr. Marketing Director, Global Channel, Americas

Sophos

Over this past year, Stern has worked hard to ensure that Sophos fulfils its “Channel Best” commitment from how the company works with and enables its partners to how the company innovates the security industry.

Years In Position: 5

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the last year, Sophos has made award-winning strides in channel and security innovation. In fact, Caralyn played an integral role in Sophos sweeping the CRN ARC awards in both the network and endpoint categories as well being awarded the 5 Star rating in in CRN's 2018 Partner Program Guide. Caralyn also helped introduced a new simplified Market development funding platform in 2018, making it easier for partners to request funding for programs to generate demand for shared solutions, upload proof of execution, and submit claims online. Caralyn also focused on increasing the number of Sophos's Synchronized Security accredited partners this year. By providing communications about advanced training and enablement for partners selling the broader Sophos portfolio â€“ both endpoint and network security products â€“ and updating its technology to ensure these products work better together, Caralyn helps Sophos' partners drive more sales. Lastly, Caralyn focused on growing the subscription base of Sophos' MSP Connect Program, which makes it easy for MSPs to deploy, manage and sell new security services, grow their revenue and lower their costs with one vendor. Caralyn championed the program by communicating the go-to-market strategy and cascading it regionally to drive growth around the world.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Caralyn considers it her job to be sure that partners have all the information they need grow their businesses, especially at a time where more organizations are realizing that they are increasingly unable to protect themselves from today's sophisticated threats. Specifically, Caralyn's goals are to ensure that Sophos is helping to drive growth for MSP partners, continuing to further the benefits of Sophos' Synchronized Security strategy and supporting partners and their customers as they evolve into the cloud space.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for our channel partners in 2019 will be selling the value of security as a system. Sophos' Synchronized Security is a best of breed security system that enables businesses defenses to be as coordinated as the attacks they protect against. By connecting with each other in real time via a Security Heartbeatâ„¢, Sophos endpoint and network solutions, including Sophos XG Firewall and Sophos Intercept X Advanced with EDR, can work together to predict and provide automatic threat detection and protection against partners' customers' threats.

Brooke Cunningham

Area VP, Global Partner Programs, Marketing, Operations

Splunk

Cunningham delivered 100-plus enhancements to Splunk’s Partner Portal. She also provided incentives that resulted in 76 percent of new customers being contributed by partners.

Years In Position: 3

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In her role leading the Splunk Global Partner Programs, Marketing and Operations team, Brooke has spearheaded the growth and development of the Partner+ Program, driving continuous advancements, improving the partner experience and expanding Splunk's partner-listening initiatives. In particular, the last 12 months saw the launch and enhancement of several major programs and services which Brooke led within the Partner+ Program, including: Continued growth of the Splunk Partner Portal, empowering partners to grow and manage their Splunk business from a modern, easy-to-use interface. In Splunk's FY19, the portal had more than 200,000 user logins from 104 countries. Further, over 100 functionality enhancements were delivered during the year, including automating not-for-resale software, simplifying deal registration and providing partners more dashboards to plan their business and manage their partnership with Splunk. Introduction of the Partner+ Systems Integrator Program, for global and regional SI's with vertical practices and specializations. The program will enable partners to build solutions and practices around Splunk. Enhancements to the Partner+ Reseller Program, providing more simplifications to deal registration, as well as added incentives for new customers, multi-year deals, partner growth and partner services delivery. Added incentives for partners across all program tracks to take advantage of available rebates.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goal at Splunk is to create an exceptional partner experience and enhance the efficiency of our program. In the next year, that means: - Increasing partners' profitability - Increasing overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, while continuing to drive company growth through partner revenue - Increasing partners' capabilities with Splunk to deliver professional services - Increasing the amount of net new customer accounts coming through partners - Delivering multi-deals and recurring revenue streams with partners - Creating an excellent end-to-end experience for Splunk partners.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? For the Splunk partner ecosystem in 2019, the keys to success include delivering on some of the following: - Software license growth, particularly partner-sourced deals and multi-year deals - Professional services delivery and growth in partner skills/bench, to deliver customer adoption and success - Closing new customers to Splunk - Building solutions with Splunk, particularly addressing new use cases such as IoT, or for specific verticals/industries.

Jeannine Edwards

Sr. Director, Channel Marketing

StorageCraft

Edwards helped refresh the Partner Success program, which included representing the company’s complete portfolio. This meant creating value across solution provider business models by adopting the StorageCraft solution set.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 21

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I collaborated with sales and other teams to bring a more focused approach to understanding the diverse set of partners in the community. I brought knowledge about Solution Provider business models -- how they make money and what they care about to more seamlessly connect what StorageCraft technology brings to the table with their needs. We infused that knowledge and connection into our partner communications. I continually work on refocusing energy into what partners care about as well as refocused energy into StorageCraft's channel event strategy. This past year has brought many changes in the solution provider marketplace, as well as many new solutions at StorageCraft. After examining these changes, I revamped the StorageCraft partner program and portal to double down on ensuring that we are continually meeting the needs of our diverse set of partners.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Goals for 2019 - Help partners understand how to capture the increased addressable market brought with explosive growth of data in the business world. - Help partners understand how StorageCraft solutions help them with customer acquisition. - Spread the word about StorageCraft's product innovation, empowering standardization in the data management and protection technology categories.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Standardizing on StorageCraft for all things data management and protection. Educating channel partners that they can do that is a first in the business continuity category.

Michelle LeVan

VP, Global AWS Alliances

Sungard Availability Services

LeVan built a channel strategy delivering customized solution packages, leading her team to propel the company from being considered an “emerging partner” to a “global strategic partner” with the largest hyper-scale cloud provider in the world in under 12 months

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 6

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I have been instrumental in building a channel strategy that programmatically narrows our channel focus to building fewer but deeper relationships with key partners where we can present a highly differentiated joint solution in the market. In working closer with these partners, we have built much tighter selling relationships, and gained greater traction through customized value propositions, and solution packages that make us easier to position to the customer, easier to close contracts and ultimately easy to do business with. This high touch, low number of partners approach has allowed us to accelerate several key relationships that will be the "needle movers" for our broader organization in the coming years.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? In 2019 I moved from leading Channel Strategy to head up a newly formed global alliance team to accelerate our hyperscale cloud business through in field execution of the 2018 built strategy. I have an aggressive goal of 10X incremental monthly recurring bookings growth in our hyperscale cloud channel. To achieve that exponential and sustained growth, I will be tasking my team to establish us as the "go to" resiliency partner, solidifying a weekly onsite partner cadence in 7 major regions across North America and EMEA, while further executing on a minimum of two key campaigns per region, per quarter.

Sarah Michaleski

Global Partner Marketing Manager

Sungard Availability Services

Michaleski created a 2019 webinar series with AWS that involves a new webinar each quarter and has three different campaigns running off one webinar. It has been a success in North America and EMEA.

Years In Position: 2

Years In Channel: 2

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Having joined the company almost two years ago, I believe I was able to bring in a fresh perspective based off of my past experience. At PwC, we used social media in our every day support of clients. I am teaching our sales people how to use social media as a way to educate themselves on our clients and what's important to them. This way, we can go in with a strong message around how we can help them achieve their business goals.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Having joined the company almost two years ago, I believe I was able to bring in a fresh perspective based off of my past experience. At PwC, we used social media in our every day support of clients. I am teaching our sales people how to use social media as a way to educate themselves on our clients and what's important to them. This way, we can go in with a strong message around how we can help them achieve their business goals.

Jana Valenti O'Connor

Sr. Director, Channel, Midmarket Marketing

Symantec

Over the past year, Valenti O’Connor developed marketing strategy, plans and programs to support channel sales. These included innovative demand generation programs and creating unique ways to communicate with partners.

Years In Position: 6

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? This year, I have focused my efforts on enhancing resources and programs around partner communications, adding dedicated resources to my team to drive further growth with our partners and driving innovative demand generation programs. I created additional vehicles to drive our message and train partners around key solution areas with an Americas Partner Roadshow series and quarterly town hall webinars with partners. I also added additional resources to my team to grow our overall communications strategy and enhance our go-to-market activities with our GSI partners. I've also invested heavily in our cloud strategy to help educate partners on our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform and how that can be a key differentiator for them in the market. Finally, I've enhanced our channel marketing programs to offer partners innovative plug-and-play activities to drive demand and increase profitability.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goals for this year include adding additional resources to my team for our Service Provider and Cloud Solution Providers, enhancing our training and enablement opportunities for our partners and extending our brand and offerings to additional partners in the SMB space.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success for our channel partners is understanding the shift in cyber security and making the necessary investments to support this shift. In order to stay relevant in our dynamic environment, they must understand how to sell an integrated platform to protect their customers from today's sophisticated attacks. Symantec's Integrated Cyber Defense Platform unifies cloud and on-premises security to provide threat protection, information protection and compliance across all endpoints, networks, email, and cloud applications. Partners need to invest in training and resources in order to drive an integrated platform approach.

April Petty

VP, Sales

Synnex

Petty has continued to increase face time with customers to better deliver information about Synnex solutions and services. This has included more events and opportunities for customers within the growing Synnex umbrella due to the integration of WestconComstor Americas.

Years In Position: 17

Years In Channel: 26

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Petty has increased face time with customers to better deliver information about SYNNEX solutions and overall value-add. Such activity has given SYNNEX both deeper and more widespread reach within its customer base, resulting in increased sales across the SYNNEX portfolio. Petty and her team have developed events that are focused around vertical segments and solutions, allowing partners to walk away with new solution offerings to extend to their customer base. Petty heads up the Secret Sauce events across the U.S., which give customers a complete understanding of the value SYNNEX brings to the channel.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Due to the transformation we are seeing in the channel, we will continue to expand our breadth and depth with our partners. We will also continue to better understand our partners' strategies so we can help them grow. Our goals are all about new business and opportunities and helping our partners along the way. We will also continue to look for net new partners by leveraging key relationships with our vendor community. With more vendors acquiring other companies, this will result in net new partners and business overall for SYNNEX.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Trust and partnership -- If someone feels they can trust you and you follow through and stand behind your word, you will have a partnership with them for many years to come. Don't forget about the little things as they can be a big thing to your partner.

Reyna Thompson

SVP, Product Management, North America

Synnex

Thompson led the expansion of the line card with key networking, security, UC and wireless LAN vendor partners, pulling these technologies into a program focused on delivering fully converged solutions to the channel.

Years In Position: 12

Years In Channel: 27

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? We are now well into the era of digital transformation. With that, customers require a higher level of innovation, knowledge and specialized resources. This requires tight collaboration between the channel, distributor and vendor. As head of the newly combined SYNNEX/Westcon Secure Networking Group, I have led the team integration effort beginning in Q4 '17. Additionally, several new initiatives were added during 2017 that delivered unique value for both vendors and the channel by generating the adoption of new emerging technology growth opportunities. The focus was to expand on this group's unique structure that provides the channel and their customers two key value propositions: 1) Providing a clear path to "Digital Innovation Adoption" and 2) Acting as a "Technology Facilitator" for vendors and service providers by expanding expertise, sales tools, and third platform line card. I continue to focus on accelerating Digital Transformation and bringing technology innovation to market faster as a monetized business for the channel.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? To better support SYNNEX resellers by focusing on advanced technology solutions. SYNNEX' focus on advanced technologies in security and networking serves to provide technology-focused education, training, and awareness for IT resellers, and provides exclusive benefits and specialized services for rapid-growth opportunities in advanced technologies. Reseller partners have access to Technology Playbooks, Resources & Collateral; Complimentary Security & Wireless Assessments; SYNNEX Exclusive Managed Cloud Firewall & Wireless Service Offerings; Special Discounts on Industry Trainings & Certifications in Advanced Technologies; Advanced Technology Strategy, Presales, & Technical Support Team.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? With the rise of Third Platform Technologies, the Secure Networking Group at SYNNEX has created a very focused strategy for MDF around Security, Cloud, IoT, Advanced Networking and UC in 2018. SYNNEX drives partner investment focused on driving Advanced Technology adoption in the coming year. Vendors and resellers who are interested in creating awareness for innovations with these technologies are being recruited to join our "Advanced Technology Solutions Community," with several key deliverables, including Advanced Technology Playbooks, Security-focused Line Cards, Sales Tools, Sales & Tech Trainings, Regional Events and Webinars.

Kaye McMillan

VP, Sales Transformation, Development

Tech Data

McMillan grew Tech Data’s public sector business by 14 percent year over year; added 42 new members to the TechSelect community, representing a significant increase in revenue; and outpaced the overall market growth year over year.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I am very proud and excited by the results we have delivered in the Tech Data Public Sector market within the channel and growing our customer and vendor partners that make up Tech Data's TechSelect community. We grew our Public Sector business by 14 percent year over year with growth in all verticals including Federal, SLED and Healthcare. We have continued to evolve and grow our TechSelect community with a focus on new member acquisition and customer growth.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? The goals for my team will always be focused on how we can positively impact the customer experience. Our initiatives this year are tied to how we can leverage business process optimization, automation and digital transformation to become more agile. We want to constantly look for ways to make it easier and faster to do business with Tech Data.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Technology is evolving faster than ever before, and Tech Data is uniquely positioned to help drive growth for our channel partners. We offer a complete end-to-end portfolio of products and services, and the expertise to turn those into solutions that drive real business outcomes. Tech Data is focused on helping our partners in their transition to next-generation technologies such as IoT, Security, Cloud and Services while at the same time recognizing opportunities in areas such as workplace transformation, digital workforce and technology as a service (TaaS).

Cheryl Neal

VP, Data, Networking

Tech Data

Neal has seen the strength and trust of the vendor and partner community in her organization grow. This has been in part due to program development and advancement supporting new technology, assistance in expanded routes to market, as well as new vendors brought on to Tech Data.

Years In Position: 4

Years In Channel: 24

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? As part of my role, I fully invest in the success of our vendors, partners and their end customers. Day in and day out, I enjoy working closely with each of our vendors and our mutual channel partners to guide them to new opportunities to grow their business, help bring their channel programs to market and expand their solution sales. I led the recruitment and on-boarding efforts of Cohesity to Tech Data. Through understanding the vendor's goals and aligning the right capabilities and people resulted in this new vendor selecting us as their sole North America distributor. Over the past year, we've built stronger programs and strategies in my organization than ever before. We've helped our vendors develop "meet in the channel" strategies, expand in entirely new solution focus areas such as big data and IoT, and enable our channel partners in new easily consumable education tactics. As part of this, Tech Data was named Nutanix Distributor of the Year and Riverbed Distributor of the Year.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My team and I will continue to capitalize on Tech Data's deep relationships with our industry-leading vendors to collaborate on business-building opportunities that will benefit our joint partner community. Our focus will target high-growth areas, including: Cloud solutions that embrace new consumption models and enable services delivery -- Analytics and IoT offerings to take advantage of the sizeable market opportunity as businesses continue to monetize their data -- Vertical market tools and leads to enable our partners to maximize their sales effectiveness In addition, we'll work closely with our vendors to develop enablement and demand-generation programs around these technologies.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? In order for our channel partners to continue to see growth and success through the next year, it is important that they position their sales and technical teams to always be on the forefront of technology and stay focused on how it supports the unique needs of their end customers. Their teams must continue to grow and evolve into those that support business outcomes. For our vendors, it is important that that continue to ensure and validate that their programs as consumable, supported with strong programs, and profitable to for the channel partners.

Louise McEvoy

VP, U.S. Channel Sales

Trend Micro

The channel has to stay focused on the dynamic market, and opportunities are moving toward being fulfilled in cloud marketplaces. McEvoy has gained more knowledge in the cloud, determining how partners can play an important role and educating teams on how to get that done.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? She traveled around the country meeting with channel partners, understanding their business services focused? MSP? Azure, AWS? Solution bundles? How do their sellers get paid? What do their customers need? She has been digging deep; determining the market dynamics and making sure Trend Micro is staying current. She has also been looking at the competitiveness of Trend Micro's channel program. Do we offer the right incentives, have the right level of discounts, a competitive incumbency and deal reg program? It's important to ensure that our partners know we're continually looking ahead with their best interest in mind.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? We work with thousands of partners, but sometimes, they're one-off deals. She wants the team to focus on those partners who have invested in Trend Micro, and in turn we'll invest in them. That means putting resources, executive sponsorship, MDF, training and much more into developing their business around Trend Micro. If we run a lead generation campaign and get five leads, she would like to give those leads to one partner, vs multiple partners; this builds loyalty and education so that the next lead comes from that partner because they recognize how to identify a Trend Micro opportunity.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key to success in 2019 will be adding value to our channel -- working strategically with them, vs opportunistically. This means growing our valued partners with a competitive program that ensures financial benefits, helping our partners understand the Trend Micro solutions in SMB and Enterprise as well as in the Cloud for Marketplace success. It also means ensuring the Trend Micro sellers understand our partners so they're bringing the right partner into an opportunity; so that together, we're most strategic to gain that customer trust and win.

Didi Dayton

VP, Worldwide Channels, Alliances

Vectra

Vectra has a straightforward channel engagement model and sells exclusively through the channel. Having just joined the company, Dayton’s primary focus will be on recruiting the team and key partners, and expanding the ecosystem into new markets. The next step is building strategic services playbook, by leveraging the success of regional U.S. partners and distribution and key solution providers in EMEA.

Years In Position: 0

Years In Channel: 14

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I believe that Channel programs are the equivalent of a compensation plan for sellers and in my capacity as the head of channels at Cylance, I guide the design, implementation and success of our team and programs to ensure maximum profitability for the partners and for Cylance. This has been the year of MSSPs for us, and it has been amazing to build the systems and process to get our MRR automation and our ConnectWise integration launched.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Cylance is a digital solution for born-in-the-cloud solution providers, and we are accommodating the needs of our customers and partners by building out products, services, and programs that are specifically geared towards digital buyers and global transformation projects. Our goals are to increase the number of Gold partners in our program, launch an AI platform and expand our distribution partnerships worldwide.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Partners need to hire amazing people, focus on few good technologies, and build IP for services or product that makes them unique. In security, partners are also shifting their business models to offer managed services.

Erika Irby

Director, Worldwide ProPartner Program

Veeam Software

Irby and her Veeam team-built governance processes related to the ProPartner agreement, created partner-specific support programs, and developed new competencies and tiers. She also oversaw portal enhancements and channel enablement.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 8

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Over the past year, my role has focused on designing and implementing a global operating framework, that acts as a hub for channel processes, best practices, KPIs, enablement and systems requirements. Additionally, we spent resources on optimizing this framework for local implementation to reflect Veeam's extremely varied and evolving partner ecosystem. Ensuring our ecosystem is inclusive is part of our vision, partners who are dedicated to driving their Veeam business and partnership are key for our program to be profitable, I also coordinated the execution of several cross-functional projects, which included a process to assess and correct partners who are currently out of compliance with our Veeam agreement or GDPR-related policies. I managed a project that unified our partner re-leveling process to ensure consistency for all regions â€“ a crucial aspect for global business optics and partners doing business worldwide. We now follow the same communication schedule and a defined set of steps and reference data sets. I also executed a project that enhanced our deal registration process in the Americas. This included internal training, enhancements to our portal, program guide and policy with focus on rewarding those partners who demonstrate value selling.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? My goal is to further enhance our program with new levels, competencies and tiers that offer more profitability for our ecosystem of partners. At Veeam we aim to enable partners to provide exceptional service to customers while securing their businesses and adding value. To that end we reward those with multiple Veeam revenue streams, highlight partners specialties and niche routes to market, and capitalize on future areas of new and growing business. This year we are also updating our ProPartner portal to automate more processes, enhance user experiences and provide more resources, tools and enablement to drive our partner's revenue.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? The key success for our channel partners is to take advantage of the myriad of revenue streams Veeam products and solutions offer. Our products are simple, flexible and reliable. Our solution offerings with strategic alliance partners and Veeam-powered services opportunities can grow deals exponentially. We also offer services enablement for partners looking to grow their services business. We encourage and facilitate partnerships between our Veeam cloud service provider's and resellers to promote profitability on both sides. As the global partner ecosystem evolves, Veeam is at the forefront of ensuring routes to market for everyone.

Jenni Flinders

Global Channel Chief

VMware

Flinders played a pivotal role in helping global partners pivot toward VMware’s strategic priorities; letting partners engage with the company based on their business model through a complete program redesign; and launching new VMware Master Services Competencies.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Through my role as global channel chief, VMware's partner base expanded through the development of existing partners into new practice areas such as network and security, digital workspace, public cloud, containers, and hyper converged infrastructure. We have on boarded new partners that are born in the cloud, and application developers, mobility, networking and storage partners. Finally, we have worked with partners to integrate and execute on acquisition strategies to acquire new competencies. Another key area I'm addressing is placing an emphasis on transforming our partnering relationship to realize the opportunities of this new and exciting digital transformation era. Our new program that we will announce in early April, will focus on creating mutual success of partners and customers, but also providing the resources and leadership to help partners build or expand their businesses in and through the cloud. In addition, my main focus over the past year has been on delivering superior value throughout the customer journey with a vibrant partner ecosystem. A key component of this in 2018 was the launch of our Master Services Competencies. This was another big step to empower partners to build a profitable services business.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Moving beyond transactional, with a laser focus on our next generation technologies -- HCI, cloud and networking. This provides a strong opportunity to rethink our strategy of how we engage with partners, and we will simplify our engagement with partners through our enhanced partner program. Services will also remain a significant opportunity for partners, empowering them to extend their VMware practices. We will pivot our investments to support these areas of focus. Partners who invest more in VMware through our new program structure will receive more investments from us. I believe in a co-invest model with our most strategic partners.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Partners should understand what they are good at and find their niche; differentiation is important now more than ever and will be very relevant in 2019. Specialization creates value, with the ability to help more customers and drive new revenue streams. Partners have many options to engage with customers. To help facilitate digital transformation conversations, VMware is aligning to the following strategic IT priorities: modernizing data centers, integrating public clouds, transforming network and security, and empowering the digital workplace.

Jennifer Kula

VP, Alliances, Channels

Wasabi Technologies

Since joining Wasabi, Kula has helped Wasabi transform into a channel-friendly company. She instituted a margin program and Wasabi is now in full recruitment mode with service providers and technology alliance partners to deliver high-value joint solutions to the channel.

Years In Position: 1

Years In Channel: 25

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? I have defined our partner strategy across our company to include a direct and indirect channel strategy which includes distribution and a direct partner program. I am in the process of vetting distributors, key strategic service providers and developing an engagement model for CSPs and MSPs that will also be adopted globally . It is imperative that we achieve significant growth in 2019 and the channel is extremely important to this effort to reach scale quickly. I am helping to elevate the presence of Wasabi in the channel through speaking opportunities at CRN and other key industry events and constantly exploring ways in which we can strengthen our market value proposition for the channel.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? The biggest goal is to get the strategy and foundation of the channel and technology alliances in place so that we can execute. Recruitment of key strategic service provider partners, alignment and joint GTM plans with technology partners such as Rubrik, Veeam and Commvault will be critical to impact revenues in 2019. We are looking to increase our channel revenue by 200% in 2019 with steep growth after our first 12 months of deploying the channel program and strategy. I will sign and launch 1-2 distributors and reach an additional 500 service provider partners for 2019.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Today, data backup and recovery solutions that leverage third party storage should be re-examined to see if their current cloud storage choice is the best option for their customers. The cloud storage vendors they have to choose from to partner with today; AWS S3, Azure and Google Cloud are expensive and add unnecessary expenses for egress and API calls to their cost models. Wasabi decreases the cost of the total solution and brings higher value in that much more data can be protected for much less and at the same level of reliability, delivering optimized value to their customers.

Michelle Welch

SVP, Marketing, Channel

WatchGuard Technologies

In 2018 Welch took over ownership of the WatchGuardOne partner program. The team began the process for implementing technology specializations and organization types, making the program more accessible to a greater number of partners.

Years In Position: 3.5

Years In Channel: 15

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? In addition to the programmatic and operational changes outlined above, Michelle personally worked with dozens of partners at various stages in their relationship with WatchGuard and at various stages of business maturity to better understand what they were struggling with, where WatchGuard could assist both immediately and over the long term. The knowledge shifted product development priorities, escalating the channel voice within the company. These interactions also defined the training curriculum for the company's 2019 Sales Event, at which the global sales team is armed with the knowledge they need to support their partners for the coming year.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Whilst we are always striving to improve every aspect of our program and how each function serves the channel, in 2019 my two top priorities are a) evolving the program to better suite partners operating as managed service providers (changing sales thresholds, evolving how marketing funds are earned, introducing new training content, etc.) and b) bringing the global channel community up to speed on WatchGuard's exciting direction and momentum.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? IT spending in the midmarket is shifting significantly from point solutions to robust managed service offerings. Growth in 2019 and beyond for IT Solution Providers will hinge on their abilities to look beyond product, move away from traditional VAR and break-fix sales models, and to deliver value-added managed services offerings. This requires operational, portfolio, sales, and marketing changes. The good news is that WatchGuard partners are not alone. We have a team of experts and plethora of resources developed specifically to help our partners make this transition.

Amy Belcher

VP, Global Partner Marketing

Xerox

In the last 12 months, Belcher and her teams have focused on making it easier for partners to do business with new partner scorecards, which provide partners with true visibility into their partner program status.

Years In Position: 1.5

Years In Channel: 20

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Developed a global partner marketing organization using industry best practices and structure to continue focus on channel expansion.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Continued focus on channel expansion including partner recruitment and activation along with rollout of new marketing automation and incentive platforms.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Reducing the number of tools and assets and increasing demand generation and leads to drive pipeline.

Charlene Fischer

VP, U.S. Channel Sales

Xerox

Fischer built a new field sales organization to call on midsize IT VARs from the ground up. This endeavor included hiring and training a national sales organization and creating a sales management support structure. The first-year result was double-digit year-over-year revenue growth.

Years In Position: 8

Years In Channel: 18

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Since 2000 I have interacted with Xerox small business partners by helping them to determine the best growth strategies for their business and how Xerox can help them in achieving their goals. I have the opportunity to help shape both the partner's strategy and Xerox's programs and services to ensure their opportunities for growth. in 2018, while creating a new field sales organization, I hired a team of high potential millennial women to work side by side with seasoned veterans thus fostering an environment to develop the next generation of Channel Partner Managers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? The goals for my organization or to grow revenue with our current IT VAR partners by double digits and acquire net new partners that will offer Xerox products and services.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? There is a tremendous opportunity to build highly profitable reoccurring revenue streams through Managed Print Services.

Deborah Purfurst

VP, Channel Sales

Xerox

Purfurst is responsible for growth of the national partners and growth in the printer space and market-share gains. She reorganized key partners and territories to ensure success and growth and showed solid growth in volume partners.

Years In Position: 10

Years In Channel: 30

How have you personally helped advance your company's channel business over the past year? Part of the team to create a new channel infrastructure for SLP, Volume and Distribution support. Successful led growth in Volume and distribution. Provide coaching and mentoring to the younger sales folks entering the channel. Involved in pricing, inventory management, forecasting, sales account planning and "special projects" to all increase Xerox revenue growth and reduce costs while increasing productivity. Coach and train many of the Millennial sellers.

What are your goals for your company's channel business over the next year? Revenue growth is our key initiative along with increased operational efficiencies and better leverage of Xerox innovation and new streams of revenue. Acquisition of new Resellers along with increasing the breadth and depth of the current partners will be critical to Xerox's success as well.

What's the key to success for your channel partners in 2019? Partnerships. This is still a relationship business and people buy from people. Understand the value proposition and being able to clearly articulate it to customers to be the trusted business advisor. Partners need to add value whether it is thru services, apps or software solution in addition to a hardware sale.