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25 INNOVATORS

11

William Largent Chairman, CEO

Veeam Software

As Veeam’s founders step out of the limelight, Largent is responsible not only for moving Veeam’s headquarters to the U.S. to be closer to the cloud, but also for shifting focus from data protection to the fastgrowing but technically more complicated data management space.

16

Salvatore Sferlazza CEO

NinjaRMM

As some legacy RMM tools have fallen prey to exploits, Sferlazza invests heavily in engineers and drives a relentless 45-day update cycle for the company’s flagship product. NinjaRMM debuted mobile capabilities and revealed the company is rolling out a partner program to drive growth.

21

Todd McKinnon Co-Founder, CEO

Okta

McKinnon has made it easier for large organizations to authenticate the traffic generated by immersive digital experiences through Okta DynamicScale. He has also simplified the identity giant’s training and accreditation process to help solution providers get sales and technical certifications.

12

Douglas Brockett President

StorageCraft

The IT industry traditionally has had primary storage and secondary storage vendors. Since Brockett joined StorageCraft in 2017 with the acquisition of Exablox, where he was CEO, he has led the push to help the company blur the line and make it a true provider of unified storage.

17

Mark Barrenechea Vice Chair, CEO, CTO

OpenText

It’s Barrenechea’s turn to try to unify security and storage. Others have tried—think Symantec/Veritas—but did not succeed. Barrenechea engineered the late 2019 acquisitions of Webroot and Carbonite, and his ability to bring them together will define OpenText’s future.

22

Eva Chen CEO

Trend Micro

Chen purchased Cloud Conformity to help Trend Micro handle misconfigurations and unprotected user accounts in the public cloud. She has gone all in on hybrid cloud security, which now accounts for one-quarter of Trend Micro’s nearly $1 billion in annual sales.

13

David Bennett CEO

Axcient

Axcient is all about protecting data, and Bennett is all about making that protection end to end. He has led Axcient through multiple acquisitions, and recently melded its acquired technologies into a single platform while adding a unique take on ransomware protection.

18

Rohit Ghai President

RSA

Ghai is making RSA more nimble and agile by carving the encryption pioneer out from the Dell Technologies behemoth and reconstituting it as an independent company under the stewardship of STG Partners.

23

Jim Whitehurst President

IBM

Whitehurst went from the staid airline industry to what he described to CRN as the “mind-bending” innovation and disruption of the open-source software business at Red Hat. Now he’s No. 2 at Big Blue following its acquisition of Red Hat—a leader IBM hopes can combine the best of those worlds.

14

Rami Rahim CEO

Juniper Networks

Cloud-first, AI-empowered networks are more critical than ever before and Rahim is taking full advantage of Juniper’s Mist Systems acquisition, which he led, to revamp Juniper’s road map. Under Rahim, Juniper is becoming a formidable player once again in the wired and wireless networking space.

19

Orion Hindawi Co-Founder, Co-CEO

Tanium

Hindawi has been laserfocused on building a mission-oriented culture at Tanium that provides the world’s largest enterprises with more visibility into their IT ecosystems. He has expanded Tanium beyond security to help customers address challenges they have around IT operations.

24

Jed Ayres CEO

IGEL

The channel, technology and marketing-savvy CEO has established IGEL as the undisputed edge operating system market leader for cloud workspaces. Under Ayres’ leadership, IGEL is headed toward 1 million IGEL operating system seats being sold and activated each year.

15

Taher Behbehani GM, Mobile B2B Division

Samsung Electronics America

Behbehani has been driving the efforts around B2B devices and mobile offerings— such as with the launches of two rugged businessfocused devices, the Galaxy Tab Active Pro tablet and XCover Pro smartphone, and the debut of Project AppStack for B2B SaaS and native app delivery.

20

Rob Rae SVP, Business Development

Datto

As Datto continues to become the industry’s top provider of the widest range of MSP-focused automation, storage, networking and management platforms, Rae is at the center of innovating the channel programs that bring those disparate technologies to MSPs large and small.

25

Gajen Kandiah CEO

Hitachi Vantara

As Hitachi Vantara’s new CEO, Kandiah is bringing an integral services mindset to the vendor amid its transformation to becoming a key IoT and big data player. Having previously led Cognizant’s digital business, Kandiah knows what it takes to bring digital practices to the next level.

25 DISRUPTERS

A partner-savvy, cloud services superstar with a Midas touch, White, a cloud computing veteran and former 20- year Microsoft executive who was instrumental in driving dramatic Azure sales growth, is working the same magic at HPE. White is disrupting cloud behemoths Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google by delivering a GreenLake on-premises KEITH WHITE SVP, GM, GreenLake cloud experience that is lookHewlett Packard Enterprise ing more and more like the public cloud experience. In just nine months on the job, he has already made big advances, bringing a simpler, point-and-click cloud consumption experience to GreenLake. At the HPE Discover Virtual Experience event, White led the cloud services charge, rolling out 17 new standardized offerings for small, midsize and large businesses. The building block breakthrough opens the door for partners to reduce the sales cycle from what previously took six 1 months to even a year down to just 14 days or less from price quote to delivery on many deals.

6

Jeff Ready CEO

Scale Computing

Ready is always ready for a fight with larger competitors in the edge computing, virtualization and hyperconverged markets. His bold innovation strategy has led to some revolutionary products for the edge, VDI and remote work infrastructure including a new all-flash, NVMe appliance.

7

George Kurtz Co-Founder, President, CEO

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike notched the largest IPO valuation in cybersecurity history and now has a market cap nearing $22 billion. Kurtz has spearheaded massive growth in CrowdStrike’s AWS partnership as customers look to secure cloud workloads and endpoints that reside on their corporate network.

8

Charles Meyers President, CEO

Equinix

Under Meyers’ leadership, the data center giant didn’t skip a beat because of the coronavirus pandemic as Equinix kept its more than 200 data centers operational while at the same time boosting sales 6 percent year over year in its first quarter.

2

Prem Jain Co-Founder, CEO

Pensando

Jain is leading the charge to flat out deliver better performance and security at the edge than rival Amazon Web Services’ Nitro system. Besides engineering chops, Jain brings a deep knowledge of working closely with partners to make blockbuster market transitions.

4

Michael Gold CEO

Intermedia

Under Gold’s leadership, Intermedia’s UC and Contact-Center-as-a-Service businesses are having their best year as demand for reliable, secure business communications explodes. Gold has been busy driving global expansion via a new partnership with Japanese telecom equipment maker NEC.

9

Jay Chaudhry Founder, CEO

Zscaler

Chaudhry has disrupted traditional network security by authenticating users and connecting them to applications without requiring firewalls or putting boxes in the cloud. He acquired Cloudneeti to protect public cloud data and Edgewise Networks to verify the identity of application software and services.

3

Bill Scannell President, Global Sales, Customer Operations

Dell Technologies

The veteran Dell channel supporter took over the new unified commercial and enterprise sales organization with the goal of driving massive marketshare gains. Scannell was critical in not letting Dell sales slip due to the pandemic during the company’s first fiscal quarter.

5

Deepak Patil SVP, GM, Dell Technologies Cloud

Dell Technologies

A Microsoft Azure founder, Patil recently joined Dell and has hit the ground running by driving innovation around the Dell Technologies Cloud, including new integration with Google Cloud, VMware Horizon and Kubernetes and a boost to its SD-WAN and security capabilities.

10

Ryan Walsh Chief Channel Officer

Pax8

With Walsh in charge of channel sales, Pax8 continues to grab market share by sticking with its plan of delivering a few high-functioning products that are fully integrated and ready to drive simplicity for MSPs. “Take some noise out of their day. Take some headache,” Walsh has said of Pax8’s approach.