CRN August 2021 - Issue 1405

ISSUE 1405 • AUGUST 2021

crn.com

TOP 100 EXECUTIVES OF 2021 PAGE 12

EMERGING VENDORS PAGE 27

FAST GROWTH 150 PAGE 40

NEWS, ANALYSIS AND PERSPECTIVE FOR VARs AND TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATORS

Strike First, Strike Hard CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is fired up as his elite endpoint protection platform continues to win over customers, and he’s pulling no punches when it comes to taking on his rivals. PAGE 6

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© 2021 The Channel Company, LLC. The Channel Company logo is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All other trademarks and trade names are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

Computer Reseller News

August 2021

Column 42 On The Record

By Robert Faletra

Features 5 Tech 10

There have been a bevy of new data center hardware products hitting the channel this year. Here are 10 of the hottest offerings.

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Fast Growth 150

The pandemic may have created big opportunities for solution providers, but business growth was by no means a certainty.

Our Fast Growth 150 companies are the ones who were able to ride the wave.

Strike First, Strike Hard

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz is fired up as his elite endpoint protection platform continues to win over customers, and he’s pulling no punches when it comes to taking on his rivals.

2021’s Top 100 Executives Our No. 1 Most Influential executive IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and 99 other leaders show that the winning formula in 2021 comes down to a combination of innovation and putting partners first.

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12 Startups Set The Pace

For reprints and plaque requests, please contact The YGS Group at 800.290.5460 or http://crnlicensing.com CRN (ISSN 1539-7343), also known as Computer Reseller News, is published 14 times a year (February, April, June, August, October, December and 8 Special Issues) by The Channel Company, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581, and is free to qualified management personnel at companies involved in the reselling/distribution of computers/networking systems, software and services. One-year subscription rates for all others in the United States are $209.00; Canada $234.00. Overseas air mail rates are: Europe $380.00; Mexico/ South America $380.00; Africa $380.00; Asia/Australia $480.00. Please mail all subscription inquiries along with checks or money orders to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581. For renewals or change of address, please include the mailing address label appearing on the front cover of the publication. Periodicals postage paid at Worcester, MA, (and additional offices, if applicable). POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Channel Company, Dept: CRN Subscriptions, One Research Drive, Suite 410A, Westborough, MA 01581. FOR SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES go to crn. com/subscribe Copyright© 2021 by The Channel Company. All Rights Reserved.

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Unencumbered by legacy products or legacy thinking, this year’s class of Emerging Vendors are going full throttle and making solution providers—and the industry at large—sit up and take notice.

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T E C H 1 0 : DATA CE NTE R New Data Center Hardware Is Making Waves There have been a slew of innovative data center product launches this year. Here are 10 of the hottest offerings from Cisco, Dell, HPE, IBM, Juniper, Lenovo and Supermicro.

By Mark Haranas 1. CISCO CATALYST IR8100

6. HPE PROLIANT DL345 GEN10 PLUS SERVER

Cisco just launched the Catalyst IR8100 Series of routers to address both routing and switching needs as one of Cisco’s first industrial-grade, fully integrated switching and routing platforms. The new hardware is powered by Cisco’s programmable IOS XE operating system that ties process and workflow automation to SD-WAN management. It also includes Cisco’s Unified Threat Defense and Cyber Vision for visibility. The router is designed to handle various 5G, public and private LTE use cases.

HPE’s new storage-optimized ProLiant DL345 Gen10 Plus server line targets database workloads. The ProLiant DL345 provides up to 128 lanes of PCIe Gen4 to improve I/O throughput and reduces latency in a single-socket design. Enclosed in a 2U server chassis, the server improves storage capacity across SAS/SATA/NVMe storage options, making it ideal for applications such as structured/unstructured database management. It is equipped with AMD third-generation EPYC processors.

2. CISCO HYPERFLEX HX-SERIES

7. IBM SPECTRUM FUSION HCI

With its UCS X-Series of servers for its HyperFlex family of HCI platforms, Cisco has implemented Kubernetes and an instance of kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation to create an Intersight Workload Engine that functions as Cisco’s operating system for the HX-Series. The offering unifies compute, storage and networking with cloud management. Cisco said it’s bringing a new era of performance to the data center with its HX220c M5 all-NVMe node.

IBM’s new Spectrum Fusion HCI is an integrated hyperconverged system for containers targeting Red Hat OpenShift for hybrid cloud, AI and GPU-enhanced workloads via IBM’s enterprise storage services. The turnkey offering deploys Red Hat OpenShift on a hybrid cloud data platform in a 42U rack that offers a containerized file system with erasure coding. It also includes Ethernet switches along with data resiliency for local and remote backup and recovery.

3. DELL POWEREDGE XE8545

8. JUNIPER QFX SERIES WITH APSTRA

Dell Technologies’ new PowerEdge XE8545 server combines AMD and Nvidia technology—designed for accelerated workloads and ideal for machine learning, HPC and GPU virtualization. The new 4U PowerEdge XE8545 server uses the maximum core counts of two thirdgeneration AMD EPYC processors with four of the highest-performing Nvidia A100 GPUs. PowerEdge XE8545 offers up to 128 cores of Milan CPUs, four Nvidia A100 GPUs and optimized performance of Nvidia’s vGPU software in a dual-socket server.

Juniper Networks’ QFX Series of switches were revamped this year with the injection of Apstra’s new 4.0 software.

Apstra 4.0 takes intent-based networking to the next level by extending intent to connections for attached systems to ensure standardized operations. Customers can create their own resusable and validated templates, with network capabilities to alert operators when anything deviates from expectations.

9. LENOVO THINKAGILE WITH VMWARE VSAN

Dell’s new VxRail V Series offers a VDIoptimized 2U one-node platform with GPU hardware for graphics-intensive desktops and workloads. The VxRail V470 and V570 models include new PowerEdge servers containing chip innovation from Intel and AMD. The VxRail V Series offers Nvidia A40 or Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPU options to provide greater performance and simpler deployment for demanding applications such as AI and machine learning.

Lenovo’s new hyperconverged ThinkAgile VX Series uses AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors and is tightly integrated with VMware vSAN to enable public cloud-like simplicity in a private or hybrid cloud environment. The VX Series is available in all-flash or hybrid configurations.

The ThinkAgile VX3575-G is designed for compute-heavy applications such as VDI and AI workloads and has the ability to support up to eight Nvidia GPUs, while the storage-dense 2U offering targets storage applications including data and analytics.

5. HPE APOLLO 2000 GEN10 PLUS

10. SUPERMICRO BIGTWIN

4. DELL VXRAIL V SERIES

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s new Apollo 2000 Gen10 Plus system is an infrastructure chassis with flexible support for up to four HPE ProLiant XL225n servers powered by AMD EPYC processors. Server nodes can be serviced without impacting operation of other nodes in the same chassis for increased server uptime. The system can be deployed with a single server, leaving room to scale as customers’ needs grow to bring the power of supercomputing to any data center. The Apollo 2000 Gen10 Plus is tailored to high-performance-computing applications.

Supermicro’s 2U BigTwin server supports two or four nodes with up to 20 DIMM slots and 4 TB of memory. The BigTwin server has flexible storage options including allNVMe and hybrid NVMe/SAS/SATA3. The networking options range from 1 GbE to 200 GbE with cost-optimized server input/output.

Supermicro’s server is made for a variety of use cases such as hosting and content delivery, software-defined storage, virtualization and the cloud. ■

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C O V E R S T O RY

Strike First, Strike Hard

By Michael Novinson

B

lackLake Security was about to initiate a threeyear CrowdStrike subscription renewal for an oil-and-gas customer when it received shocking news: The customer had been wooed by lower pricing and was switching to Microsoft.

But BlackLake founder and CEO Mark Jones knew the customer didn’t fully understand how much functionality and performance it would be giving up if it made the change, so he convinced the customer, which Jones declined to name, to take a call with BlackLake and CrowdStrike to let them lay out all the ways CrowdStrike’s technology beats Microsoft’s.

CrowdStrike’s engineer didn’t even make it halfway through the presentation before the customer changed its mind and decided to renew, Jones said.

“Microsoft will come in and give you a price that makes you go, ‘Wow, is CrowdStrike really that much better?’ Well, yeah, it actually is,” Jones told CRN. “You get what you pay for.”

With wins like that under his belt, it’s no wonder CrowdStrike co-founder, President and CEO George Kurtz is confident in the company’s technology, pulling no punches whether he’s fighting off hackers with his company’s elite endpoint protection platform or taking on rivals like Microsoft and SentinelOne by calling out where he says they fall short.

“When you look at our success, we’ve got the financial success and the performance, but that starts with having the best technology and the best platform, not just the best AV [anti-virus] product,” said Kurtz, who’s ranked as the ninth most influential leader on CRN’s 2021 Top 100 Executives list (see p. 14).

CrowdStrike’s technology earns kudos from industry analysts as well. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company’s Falcon platform beat out 11 competitors to take the crown as Forrester’s top endpoint security SaaS product this year. And in Gartner’s 2021

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Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, CrowdStrike, along with Microsoft, earned the highest ratings by a significant margin.

Kurtz’s confidence also comes in part from CrowdStrike’s ability to outlast many of its early foes. A slew of startups, including CrowdStrike, emerged in the 2000s and early 2010s to take on weaknesses in Symantec’s and McAfee’s anti-virus products with a modern approach that’s predictive, signatureless and goes beyond prevention. But most of those challengers cashed in their chips in 2019, with Carbon Black, Cylance and Endgame getting bought by VMware, BlackBerry and Elastic, respectively, for a combined $3.7 billion.

“They didn’t build a platform. They were one-trick ponies that built a slightly better AV product than the legacy players that were out there,” Kurtz told CRN in an exclusive interview in July. “But for me, it was all about, ‘Let’s build the platform the right way. And let’s have investors that understand this is a long play.’ We saw the big play of being the Salesforce of security.”

Elastic told CRN that Endgame’s product combined anti-virus with endpoint detection and response. BlackBerry and VMware Carbon Black did not respond to a request for comment.

CrowdStrike went public in June 2019 at a then-industryrecord $6.6 billion valuation. It was the fastest-growing public company in all of cybersecurity in 2020, with sales surging 82 percent to $874.4 million. And the customer wins keep on rolling in this year, with revenue expected to jump 56 percent to $1.36 billion. Seventy-five percent of its sales come through the channel.

CrowdStrike substantially increased its market share in 2020 to become the world’s second-largest corporate endpoint security vendor, capturing 9.2 percent of the $8.2 billion market.

That trails only Trend Micro, according to research firm IDC. And

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as of press time, CrowdStrike is worth $59.43 billion, making it the most highly valued pure-play vendor in all of cybersecurity.

‘A Crisis In Trust Around Microsoft Technologies’ CrowdStrike has become one of Microsoft’s most vocal security critics, with Kurtz blasting “systemic weaknesses in the Windows authentication architecture” for exacerbating the impact of the SolarWinds hack during written and oral testimony before the U.S. Senate in February. Shortcomings in how Microsoft authenticates credentials have been replicated in the cloud, furthering customer pain, he said.

“In other technologies, you can’t necessarily just steal passwords and use those encrypted passwords to authenticate to something,” Kurtz told CRN. “But in the Microsoft world, you literally can steal an encrypted password, without even decrypting it, and pass that hash to another Microsoft system and access the system as if you knew what the password was.”

Kurtz is far from the only CrowdStrike employee criticizing Microsoft, with Vice President of Public Sector James Yeager putting the company on notice in late June after the Russian foreign intelligence service breached a Microsoft support agent’s machine and used the account information it obtained to launch highly targeted attacks against customers. “[Microsoft] continues to get exposed as a company [that] is completely incapable of providing the most basic level of protection for themselves and their customers,” Yeager wrote on LinkedIn. “If you cannot secure your own infrastructure, then why should anyone trust you to secure their critical infrastructure and data?”

Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s head of communications, fired back at Yeager, saying it’s irresponsible to suggest that any company or person is immune to attacks in today’s threat landscape. “It’s unfortunate to see some vendors attempt to further their position via innuendo and inaccurate accusations rather than seeking ways to contribute collaboratively,” Shaw wrote in a LinkedIn response to Yeager’s post.

The company declined to respond to Kurtz’s specific allegations, telling CRN only, “Microsoft is the world’s largest cybersecurity provider, securing customers from the chip to the cloud, backed by more than 3,500 defenders at Microsoft and the more than 8 trillion security signals we process every day.”

But from Kurtz’s perspective, companies that use Microsoft security products to safeguard Microsoft technology are exposing themselves to “systemic risk” and would benefit from having products and authentication standards in place that weren’t built by just one company.

“We’re seeing a crisis in trust around Microsoft technologies,” Kurtz said. “Companies are taking a second look, saying, ‘Do I really want my security to be from the same vendor that is providing my operating system?’ Looking at the history of vulnerabilities that are out there and how they’ve been exploited, they’re basically saying, ‘Maybe we should reduce the risk by going with another vendor.’”

Microsoft’s biggest competitors in the endpoint, email, identity and cloud security spaces—CrowdStrike, Proofpoint, Okta and Netskope, respectively—came together in June 2020 to form the Spectra Alliance, which is focused on securing remote work at scale and establishing a zero trust security posture. Kurtz said Spectra Alliance customers benefit from the breadth of capabilities and dedicated security focus.

“If you look at CrowdStrike, every day all we do is think about security,” Kurtz said. “If you look at Microsoft, they’re thinking about their cloud and office productivity and gaming systems. It isn’t their sole focus. Security is a very broad landscape. There’s not one security company that does everything. It’s just very complicated and broad.And I think having a dedicated focus … goes a long way.”

Kurtz said CrowdStrike customers also benefit from new features being pushed out via an agent rather than requiring an update of the entire operating system like Microsoft, which adds some latency.

“Ours is a full platform approach that covers multiple operating systems with great capability.When you look at our Mac [platform], when you look at our Linux [platform], our technology is far superior to Microsoft,” Kurtz said. “It’s not a bolt-on to an operating system. When you look at Microsoft’s technology, it is based on a 2004 acquisition they did. It still uses signatures. And it’s covering a small slice of the overall ecosystem.”

Both the Spectra Alliance and Microsoft have capitalized on growing demand for advanced security capabilities, with customers opting for a best-of-breed approach that includes CrowdStrike when they have the expertise internally to tie together security products from different vendors, according to a security solution provider executive, who asked not to be named. The solution provider works with both CrowdStrike and Microsoft.

But where Microsoft Defender for Endpoint tends to be most popular is with enterprises that value simplicity and have already adopted other elements of the company’s security stack, according to the executive, who said his company is seeing Microsoft “more and more.”

“If you’re already a Microsoft shop, sometimes people say, ‘I might as well just extend my current architecture and use Microsoft.

I’m already Microsoft-heavy,’” the executive said. “It is a solution that works. It may not be best-of-breed, but it doesn’t necessarily require extra effort to create that integration.”

A Laser Focus On SentinelOne If Microsoft is CrowdStrike’s top endpoint security competitor today, the company’s biggest emerging rival in the endpoint security market is without a doubt SentinelOne. SentinelOne burst into the public market at the end of June with the biggest cybersecurity initial public offering of all time, raising $1.2 billion on a record-breaking $10 billion valuation, smashing CrowdStrike’s IPO valuation from two years ago.

CrowdStrike has been laser-focused on SentinelOne, with Kurtz citing four customers during the company’s three most recent earnings calls that have switched from SentinelOne to

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C O V E R S T O RY CrowdStrike due to what he said were efficacy, scalability, performance, interoperability and outage issues experienced with SentinelOne. Kurtz said SentinelOne suffers from being built as an anti-virus product with no compression algorithm to work at scale.

“When you try to retrofit these AV products on-premises, you get into a big scalability issue trying to move data at scale and not impact performance and not impact margins,” Kurtz said. “Developers and users were having so many problems with system resources and slowdowns and false positives that companies were forced to turn things off, which is why they moved in the direction of CrowdStrike.”

SentinelOne COO Nicholas Warner fired back, saying his company was born in the cloud and pioneered a revolutionary approach to unifying endpoint protection, detection and response through behavioral AI technology. The company’s platform is highly rated for system performance by third parties like Gartner and doesn’t rely on humans writing signatures or monitoring activities in a console, Warner said in a statement.

“It’s telling to see the amount of time a worried vendor spends talking about a fast-rising competitor,” he said. “We thank them for raising SentinelOne’s awareness and validating our market traction. The reality we see in the market is that enterprises are still being breached too often, including CrowdStrike’s own customers,” pointing to research that indicates CrowdStrike Falcon was installed on some endpoints compromised during the SolarWinds hack last year. (CrowdStrike said, “No existing CrowdStrike Falcon customer with default recommended settings was breached.”)

Ninety-six percent of SentinelOne’s sales went through the channel in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2021.

Kurtz also lambastes SentinelOne for “buying growth” in an effort to impress investors. SentinelOne’s loss of $117.6 million in its most recent fiscal year actually exceeded the $93.1 million of revenue it generated over the same period. CrowdStrike in fiscal 2021 recorded a smaller loss of $92.6 million with 9X the revenue when compared to SentinelOne. “You can only buy growth for so long, and you can see that show up in their margins,” Kurtz said. “The gross margins actually went down from 58 percent [in SentinelOne’s quarter ended April 30, 2020] to 53 percent [in the quarter ended April 30, 2021]. That’s not a good trend. At some point, you’ve got to reverse the losses and start generating cash.” CrowdStrike’s gross margin held steady at 74 percent over the same period, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

SentinelOne has gone after CrowdStrike’s customers aggressively with a “win-at-all-costs” mentality and has been willing to discount steeply to acquire new business, according to a cybersecurity services executive who works with both companies and asked not to be identified.

“With the IPO and all the noise out there, SentinelOne is sort of the new bar that just opened up,” the executive said. “A lot of people are walking in there and having a drink. The product does what it says it will do. SentinelOne definitely doesn’t have the portfolio that a CrowdStrike has today, but will it over time? I think we’ll have to see.”

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Embracing AWS Marketplace Kurtz’s sharp criticisms of Microsoft come as CrowdStrike has embraced top Azure rival Amazon Web Services. CrowdStrike’s annual recurring revenue generated through the AWS Marketplace grew by 650 percent to “well over” $50 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, while transaction volume during that time grew by more than 300 percent, Kurtz said during an April investor briefing.

“It’s been a really good relationship. I’d put [CrowdStrike] at the very top in terms of our partners,” said Chris Grusz, director of business development for AWS Marketplace. “They’re providing that feedback and working with us side by side. It’s a very nice experience for our joint customers. They’ve done all the work to really make it as easy as possible for our customers to buy their solution via AWS Marketplace.”

CrowdStrike has been a design partner, launch partner and leading adopter of AWS Marketplace’s channel partner private offer (CPPO) feature, which allows solution providers to put CrowdStrike subscriptions directly on a customer’s AWS bill through feeds into downstream reporting systems and integrations with governance tools, dramatically shortening the time needed to close deals, Grusz said.

Deals transacted by CrowdStrike through the AWS Marketplace close almost 50 percent faster since payment terms don’t need to be set or negotiated separately for each customer, and the CrowdStrike subscription appears directly on the bill as soon as the customer hits “accept,” according to Grusz.

“Companies like SHI and Optiv and WWT are actually offering CrowdStrike to their customers based on the AWS Marketplace,” said Matthew Polly, CrowdStrike’s vice president of worldwide alliances, channels and business development. “[CPPO] really streamlines the procurement process. You don’t need wet signatures or even a DocuSign. It’s a click-through process.”

CrowdStrike’s AWS investments span the entire organization from integrating the company’s CRM system into the AWS customer portal to coordinating and collaborating on field sales efforts for joint customers, Grusz said. CrowdStrike and AWS have done co-sell and demand generation campaigns together since 2018, and work has begun on the 2022 campaign.

“We’ve got a pretty strong muscle built up with them on how we do demand gen, and it’s been a big contributor to their success through AWS Marketplace,” Grusz said.

‘You’ve Got To Feed The Channel First’ “As a partner-first company, we’re always striving to get more revenue through the channel and more channel pull,” Kurtz said. “We spent a lot of time building the channel and creating opportunities. You’ve got to feed the channel first, and then it rewards you. And I think we’ve done a really good job of that.”

One example is its partnership with Optiv, where CrowdStrike has long been one of the 400 vendors appearing on the solution provider’s line card. But in recent months, the relationship between the two cybersecurity heavyweights has transformed.

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Instead of viewing CrowdStrike’s industry-leading incident response practice as a competitive threat, Optiv, No. 25 on the 2021 CRN Solution Provider 500, started seeing it as a business opportunity. As a result, the industry’s most valuable vendor and its largest pure-play solution provider began delivering a joint offering that combines CrowdStrike’s incident response muscle with Optiv’s remediation expertise.

“What gives me great joy is it’s two really good companies joining together on a very critical mission to help our clients in a moment of distress,” Optiv CEO Kevin Lynch told CRN. The unique arrangement allows Denver-based Optiv to ride CrowdStrike’s incident response coattails and get brought into new accounts, with CrowdStrike spearheading the initial triage work to identify, isolate and remove the adversary from the victim’s environment. Once the adversary has been thwarted, Optiv takes the lead on the post-incident cleanup, restoring data, rebuilding systems and fixing infrastructure flaws.

“We have moved to that ecosystem status where we’re doing more together and we’re thinking about the things that we can do together,” Lynch said. “We’re not just looking at what they have today and taking it to market.”

CrowdStrike has sought to provide the channel with more service delivery opportunities and began building out managed services partnerships two years ago. Today, Polly said the company has more than 300 MSPs wrapping their own services around CrowdStrike’s technology. Strengthening its managed services muscle helped CrowdStrike penetrate some of the world’s largest enterprise accounts as well as gain market share among customers with fewer than 5,000 employees.

“We’re focused on making sure that partners have a profitable way to engage with CrowdStrike across a variety of different vectors,” Polly said. “We built that technology and built [an MSP] program to start with, and we’ve steadily been adding those partners.”

For systems integrator EY, CrowdStrike is the primary endpoint security technology it uses in its managed services offering, which marries CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform and incident response services with EY’s risk assessments and security consulting services to minimize the potential impact from ransomware, said EY Global CTO Nicola Morini Bianzino. Both CrowdStrike and EY bring the other into opportunities that are a good fit.

“They’re really strong in the incident response, we’re strong on the front end, and their technology really underpins both,” Bianzino told CRN. “There was no real overlap or conflict between our two services organizations.”

EY has seen the strongest interest in CrowdStrike’s technology from very large organizations in the consumer goods, telecom and utility verticals since those industries are very sensitive to potential security risks. The two companies first partnered in October to better identify, prevent and respond to cyberthreats and expanded the relationship in May to combat ransomware and accelerate zero trust.

“EY is one of the largest services companies on the planet, and

they’re all in on CrowdStrike. Because we’ve got the best technology out there, they’re leveraging our technology to empower their digital transformation services,” Kurtz said. “We’re having conversations at the highest level of the company—board level, at the CXO level.”

Further downmarket, managed detection and response company eSentire has seen huge demand for CrowdStrike Falcon among customers with at least 500 employees in the manufacturing, legal and health-care spaces, said Chief Channel Officer Bob Layton. Since late 2019, eSentire customers purchasing an expert-level bundle have been able to choose between Carbon Black, Microsoft Defender or CrowdStrike’s Prevent NGAV and Insight EDR offerings.

“The customer base and the customer requests for CrowdStrike are very robust,” Layton told CRN. “As CrowdStrike’s voice in the market becomes louder and louder, we’re starting to see more people come to us with Falcon licensing.”

CrowdStrike has made its platform more MSP-friendly by investing heavily in multitenancy, allowing partners to manage multiple customers from a single parent console and apply different settings based on what each customer purchased, Polly said.

The company has also given MSPs a self-service portal where they can easily spin up, install and start to manage CrowdStrike agents on customer endpoints.

CrowdStrike also has adopted a business model where MSPs can be invoiced monthly on a per-customer basis to better align what partners owe with the money MSPs are collecting from their customers, Polly said. And for customers who want to have CrowdStrike manage its own technology, the company is tapping partners like CDW to bring its Falcon Complete managed detection and response offering downmarket.

Looking ahead, Kurtz said partners would be well-served by adding CrowdStrike’s Falcon Cloud Workload Protection to their portfolio since most customers don’t have any technology in place today that safeguards cloud workloads. The proliferation of such workloads is incredible, with CrowdStrike protecting 1.2 billion ephemeral containers each day, he said, noting that number is only expected to grow.

“It’s not like you show up on a cloud workload and you’re replacing McAfee and Symantec,” Kurtz said. “There’s just nothing there. I think it is really an underprotected area, and I think it’s an under-represented TAM [total addressable market].”

After six years teaming with CrowdStrike and seeing significant growth, elite partner Consortium Networks and its founder Larry Pfeifer have a unique perspective into the vendor’s trajectory. Following its IPO success, CrowdStrike hasn’t rested on its laurels and instead has continued to act boldly, he said, pointing to its move to acquire two companies and roll out a whole new model for threat intelligence.

“I don’t think their CEO has ever taken their foot off the gas pedal. I think he’s been relentless,” Pfeifer said. “They’re not afraid of breaking what they got to make it better. I can’t think of another company that’s done that.”

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C O V E R S T O RY CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz Takes Big Swings At Microsoft, SentinelOne CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has never been afraid of calling things as he sees them, especially when it comes to two of his top foes: Microsoft and SentinelOne. CrowdStrike and Microsoft are recognized by research firm Gartner as having the best endpoint protection platforms, but Kurtz said Microsoft suffers from a lack of focus on security and architectural issues with how it goes about authenticating credentials.

SentinelOne, meanwhile, just completed the biggest cybersecurity IPO of all time, but Kurtz said the endpoint security upstart is “buying growth” and struggles to have its technology perform at scale. SentinelOne responded to Kurtz’s allegations in detail (see story), while Microsoft declined to directly engage with Kurtz’s claims. Here’s why Kurtz thinks CrowdStrike has the edge over its biggest rivals.

You said the architectural design of Microsoft’s authentication process poses a risk. How much of a risk?

I think it poses a big risk. We talked about Active Directory attacks and credential theft. It started back in 1999 when the original first edition was written, and now, these systemic weaknesses in credentials and authentication from a directory structure perspective have been replicated into the Microsoft Cloud and their directory services. You’ve seen things like Golden SAML, which we talked about. You have Golden Ticket attacks, which are mostly on-prem, and now you have Golden SAML attacks, which multiplies the exposure across cloud environments and different customers. So it’s certainly an issue that needs to be highlighted and addressed.

Should Microsoft have acted sooner to address the Golden SAML vulnerability?

If so, how?

I think it [Golden SAML] should have been addressed, and that’s for them to figure out how to fix their architecture.

If you just look at the basic credentials in Microsoft System, and then you look at just about any incident response case that we’ve ever investigated that involved Microsoft technologies, I can’t think of one that didn’t have credential theft. Not one. That’s a massive vector that if you can compromise one system within five minutes, you can compromise an entire domain, which routinely happens. Fixing their architectural challenges around credentials and Active Directory, that’s a Microsoft question, but it certainly needs to be addressed.

Do you see similar issues with credential theft from other vendors or is it unique to Microsoft?

It’s less so [an issue with other vendors]. In other technologies, you can’t necessarily just steal passwords and use those encrypted passwords to authenticate to something.

So if you stole a Unix password, you can’t just take it and pass the hash to log into another system. It just doesn’t work that way. But in the Microsoft world, you literally can steal an encrypted password, without even decrypting it, and pass that hash to another Microsoft system and access the system as if you knew what the password was.

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What might a more community-driven approach to authentication look like?

You’ve got a systemic risk with a monoculture with Microsoft with their Active Directory plus their own operating system. There are various open standards out there in terms of authentication, and leveraging a standard that wasn’t built by just one company I think could be beneficial to the community.

Do you see increasing concern around the risk associated with a Microsoft monoculture?

We’ve seen a crisis in trust around Microsoft technologies.

Their operating system obviously is ubiquitous. Companies are taking a second look saying, ‘Well, do I really want my security to be from the same vendor that is providing my operating system?’ Looking at the history of vulnerabilities that are out there and how they’ve been exploited, they’re basically saying like, ‘Maybe we should reduce the risk by going with another vendor that isn’t necessarily the ones that have to patch our operating system.’ And we’ve seen that from multiple big companies that are out there.

Why do you think a best-of-breed approach where customers use CrowdStrike for endpoint, Proofpoint for email and Okta for identity security is superior to standardizing on Microsoft?

I think it’s a best-of-platform approach. Years ago, you would have best-of-suite, you’d have best-of-breed. And today, in my opinion, it’s best-of-platform. So you’ve got a platform like CrowdStrike and Okta and Zscaler, and organizations want to be able to plug those APIs together and just have everything work. If you look at CrowdStrike, every day all we do is think about security. If you look at Microsoft, they’re thinking about their cloud and office productivity and gaming systems. It isn’t their sole focus.

Security is a very broad landscape. There’s not one security company that does everything; it’s just very complicated and broad. And I think having a dedicated focus where every day, every CrowdStriker is getting up and thinking about how we protect our customers and stop breaches goes a long way.

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How do you think customers benefit from working with a pure-play security company like CrowdStrike versus a broader technology company like Microsoft?

I think it’s about focus and speed. If you look at Microsoft technology, a lot of times you’ll have to wait for an OS update to get new features out of your EDR. That doesn’t happen with CrowdStrike. We’ll just update our agent and add new features or update our cloud or what have you.

So we’re not depending on the operating system updates.

That adds a lot of latency in terms of those features. I think that’s a pretty good example.

Why doesn’t CrowdStrike feel Office 365 is consistent with a secure IT architecture?

I think it’s the cloud element, when you think about the directory services that you have to have for that architecture. You’re taking an antiquated authentication system and now you’re just applying it to the cloud. So that’s our challenge. We don’t use Office 365.

Why do you believe CrowdStrike’s approach to endpoint protection is superior to Microsoft’s?

It’s a full platform approach that covers with great capability multiple operating systems. And again, it gets back to that focus. When you look at our Mac [platform], when you look at our Linux [platform], our technology is far superior to Microsoft. When you look at the platform and the modules—19 modules covering vulnerability management, our services like managed detection and response, our integrated threat intelligence—it’s a full platform like Salesforce that’s dedicated to security. It’s not a bolt-on to an operating system. And it isn’t based on a legacy product. When you look at Microsoft’s technology, it is based on a 2004 acquisition they did. It still uses signatures. And it’s covering a small slice of the overall ecosystem when you think about its focus on the Windows world.

Why do you think that SentinelOne got such a high valuation at IPO? I certainly think the market timing is pretty good to IPO at the moment. Multiples are up. I think there’s a pretty big tailwind from an IPO perspective.

What does the valuation that SentinelOne got say more broadly about the endpoint security market?

[Endpoint security] is a big market, and there are lots of opportunities for companies that are out there. It’s a big TAM [total addressable market], big market. When you look at the threat landscape, there are lots of continued threats out there. And I think that bodes well for anyone in the endpoint security market.

Do you feel it’s sustainable for SentinelOne to be losing as much money as it is today?

You can only buy growth for so long, and you can see that show up in their margins. The gross margins actually went down from 58 percent [in SentinelOne’s quarter ended April 30, 2020] to 53 percent [in the quarter ended April 30, 2021]. That’s not a good trend. Buying growth [only works for] so long. I think we’ve seen this story before with FireEye when it first became public. And at some point, you’ve got to reverse the losses and start generating cash.

What have you heard the experience is like for customers when they attempt to deploy SentinelOne? It was built as an AV product, not a full EDR, not a platform. There’s no compression algorithm for the experience of working at the scale we work on in the cloud. And when you look at how we built the technology, the fact that we don’t have to reboot systems, the fact that they do. The fact that it impacts and uses so much of their system resources. We started with the agent collecting data, and then we added prevention, as opposed to starting with an on-prem product—which they did—that was AV-focused. When you look at a true platform versus an AV on-prem, when you try to retrofit these AV products on-premise, just like Cylance, you get into a big scalability issue trying to move data at scale and not impact performance and not impact margins.

What we found is that developers and users were having so many problems with system resources and slowdown and false positives that companies were forced to turn things off, which is why they moved in the direction of CrowdStrike.

What have you been able to do with the Humio acquisition compared with what SentinelOne gained from its Scalyr acquisition?

The Humio technology is fantastic, and that’s the technology that SentinelOne actually wanted [SentinelOne disputes this]. We were fortunate that we’ve got the right company, and those folks wanted to join us, so Humio became part of the CrowdStrike family. And SentinelOne had to choose something other than No. 1 in the market to buy. So, from my perspective on the Humio side, its index-free ingestion makes it incredibly scalable. The performance is unbelievable in terms of your ability to search across unstructured data. Its compression algorithms—we can actually search in compression—really reduces costs. And it runs in a hybrid mode, so you don’t necessarily have to have all the data in one spot under the cloud. You can distribute the data to different places. We think that’s a real advantage in terms of flexibility. Customers love it. We’ve got some really big deals done, which I called out at the last earnings call. We continue to build that out, and we’re as excited as ever about that acquisition. n

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TOP 100 E X E CUTIVE S

The TOP 100 Executives Of 2021 For executives in the rapidly changing tech industry, bringing a focus on driving innovation while putting partners at the center is a winning combination. That approach is something you’ll find throughout this year’s class of the Top 100 Executives—whether it’s with IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, who ranked No. 1 among the Most Influential executives of 2021; George Hope, worldwide head of partner sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, who ranked atop the Channel Sales Leaders category; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who topped the list in the Innovators category; or SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten, who is No. 1 on the Disrupters list.

Across our list you’ll find business and technology leaders who are taking bold steps to move their companies in new channel-friendly directions, shake up the status quo, work more closely with partners and make big bets on where the market is heading next. Crucially, you’ll find executives who aren’t afraid to move quickly—even in a time when uncertainty is rampant due to the ongoing pandemic and the economic upheaval it has wrought.

Krishna, in particular, is emblematic of these traits. He has spent his first 16 months in the role aggressively pursuing the goal of transforming IBM into the industry leader in hybrid cloud and AI. At the same time, he has brought a massively expanded focus on partners. Krishna and the other standouts chosen for our list prove that winning leaders are those who embrace innovation while going all in with partners in the pursuit of accelerating digital transformation for customers.

IBM’s Krishna: ‘I Bleed Blue’

By Steven Burke

A

RVIND KRISHNA COULD not believe his good fortune when as a young graduate student completing his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering he first walked through the doors of IBM’s iconic Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

“It was just so energizing,” he said, recalling those heady days when the internet and wireless networking were still on the horizon.

Krishna was bursting with ideas on how to play his part in the research organization responsible for the earth-shattering advances in semiconductors and computer architecture that moved the entire information technology industry into one new era after another.

“In the first three months, I was applying coding theory,” said Krishna. “I was applying packet networking. I was applying all the things I learned about, including eventually what was called the internet. In those days, it was just called the TCP/IP network.”

Thirty-one years later, Krishna—who is now the chairman and CEO of IBM—is pushing the company at which he started his career to break beyond the “enduring platforms” it created in mainframe, services and middleware into what he calls the “fourth” IBM platform: hybrid cloud.

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To make that happen, Krishna has IBM moving at lightning speed to become the leader in hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence. In just 16 months at the helm, Krishna has made 14 acquisitions, set in motion the spin-off of IBM’s $19 billion Global Technology Services managed infrastructure unit and put in place the biggest change in IBM’s go-to-market model in the last three decades. All of this is in pursuit of his ambitious goal to make the storied computer company he loves so dearly the undisputed winner of the architectural battle in the cloud.

Krishna said it is a privilege to be “a custodian” of the rich IBM legacy. “I bleed blue,” he said. “It’s the people. It’s the technology. It’s the clients and all IBM has done.”

The progress Krishna has made in transforming IBM into a hybrid cloud-AI powerhouse with a renewed focus on partners, innovation and growth has made him the No. 1 Most Influential Executive on CRN’s 2021 Top 100 Executives list. Krishna’s $1 billion investment in elevating the IBM partner ecosystem and a simplified account engagement model that relies more heavily on partners has forever changed the channel landscape.

Under Krishna’s new simplified account model, several hundred top global accounts are served direct. Everything else—segment two—is now the domain of IBM ecosystem partners.

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Arvind Krishna Chairman, CEO IBM

Mark Wyllie, CEO of Flagship Solutions Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based IBM partner that recently merged with Data Storage Corp. to tackle the growing IBM hybrid cloud-AI opportunity, said Krishna is the most “partner-focused” CEO he has seen in his 23 years teaming with IBM. “The sky is the limit with this new go-to-market model,” said Wyllie. “We are seeing more and more qualified opportunities working with IBM sales reps than we ever have in the past.

Every week we get more activity from more sales reps that we haven’t worked with before. IBM is pulling partners into deals, and we are seeing less conflict between the channel and IBM direct. We have seen a pretty substantial change in the field.

IBM reps have gotten the message in segment two that they don’t get paid unless it goes through a partner.”

Krishna is making the big bold moves necessary to have IBM recognized as a cloud leader, said Wyllie. “Hybrid cloud is the right approach for customers—the reality is there are some things that lend themselves to on-prem and others that lend themselves to cloud,” he said. “What IBM is doing is having those two worlds co-exist and interoperate. That is the future.”

Krishna, an engineer at heart, has brought the technical acumen to make hybrid cloud-AI a reality for customers, said Wyllie. Part of that involves putting IBM technical reps in the field to help craft game-changing solutions with partners. “Arvind’s technical background is making a big difference,” he said.

Chris Kotte, senior vice president of sales at Chattanooga Tenn.-based InfoSystems, a longtime IBM partner that has transformed itself into a Red Hat hybrid cloud standout, said Krishna’s bet on Red Hat has opened up new strategic cloud business opportunities with large enterprise customers. “What Arvind has done for us with Red Hat and IBM cloud has opened up our addressable market space significantly,” he said. “With our Red Hat focus we are now talking to multibillion-dollar companies that we were never involved with before.”

The Red Hat sales pipeline is growing via deep strategic

business discussions with customers anxious to make the cloud journey, said Kotte. The IBM hybrid cloud focus has also opened up new security services opportunities, he said. “We’ve got a significant cybersecurity practice that has benefited from our OpenShift, Ansible and hybrid cloud discussions,” he said.

“We have got more and more customers that are focused on trying to get their arms around specific areas of their business as it relates to ransomware, making sure they are protected in more ways than they ever have been before.”

Kotte credits Krishna with bringing a deeper focus on partners to IBM. “It’s great to have a chairman and CEO at the top that is focused on his Business Partners with a clearly defined strategy on Red Hat and IBM cloud,” he said. “That is huge. IBM is really sending a good message to the Business Partner community. You go back several years ago and we were getting some mixed messages in our community as far as whether we were supported or not.”

Rich Hume, CEO of Tech Data, the Clearwater, Fla.-based distributor that is teaming with IBM to build a robust on-ramp for partners to IBM’s hybrid cloud-AI portfolio, said Krishna’s strategy is “taking root” and “gaining momentum.”

In fact, he said, Tech Data partners are already seeing the impact of IBM’s channel investments and simplified go-to-market model.

“IBM made it very clear that the segment two in their coverage model was going to be realigned and very partner-oriented,” said Hume. “They are moving very quickly in getting that realignment done, and certainly we are seeing the beginning benefits of that.

I think it is going to become more and more material over time.

That coverage model is well under way.”

Krishna said his goal is to more than double the revenue with partners over the next three to five years by “fundamentally growing” the channel business—but not at the cost of other parts of the IBM business. “This is a win-win-win,” he said. “It’s a win for our clients. It’s a win for our partners and hence it is a win for us. It is in that order. I think being able to work together really brings a lot more value. I fundamentally hold the belief that IBM

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25 MOST INFLUENTIAL should never get more than 10 [percent]to 20 percent of that value. A big amount goes to the client and a big amount goes to the partner.”

Krishna is urging partners to specialize in application and mainframe modernization with a focus on hybrid cloud. “The rallying cry has to be: ‘Let’s go get our clients on a hybrid cloud journey,’” he said.

The speed at which Krishna has IBM moving has led to a more entrepreneurial spirit inside the company. Krishna is encouraging more risk-taking with his credo that “perfection is the enemy of good.” At the same time he is pushing IBM to move faster, he is determined to make it easier for customers and partners to do business with IBM. Krishna said the IBM transformation does not have an end point, but rather is a journey with ever more rapid technology innovation. “You never stop,” he said. “Today we’re talking about hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence. Five years from now we’ll be talking about quantum computing. Five years from then it could be something else that we need to add to our repertoire. The point is you are always learning.”

That focus on “always learning” harkens back to one of the lessons Krishna absorbed early on at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center: Always “look around the corner” into the future. Once you see what’s coming next, Krishna said, you need to work on breakthroughs that have long-lasting “value” for customers. That has over the years translated into one IBM innovation after another from the early days of computing with punch cards to the invention of mainframe computers, the universal bar code, RISC architecture and even helping put a man on the moon through the use of IBM systems.

In fact, Krishna said, the passion for delivering technology advances for customers that was stoked in his early days working in the renowned IBM research organization has never left him.

“That is what created so much energy in me that it continues on into today,” he said.

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Satya Nadella

Antonio Neri

Chairman, CEO

President, CEO Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Microsoft

In his seventh year leading Microsoft, Nadella added chairman to his title in June as he approaches his third decade at the technology giant, whose cloud computing division continues to enjoy strong growth and gain market share with its Azure, Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 portfolios.

Neri is a true technology visionary. His big bold bet three years ago to transform the company into an edge-to-cloud Platform-asa-Service powerhouse is paying off for HPE and its partners, while its groundbreaking GreenLake payper-use model is changing the face of the channel.

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Michael Dell

Chuck Robbins

Chairman, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Dell Technologies

Cisco Systems

Dell is once again transforming his company with an eye toward becoming an infrastructure and PC as-a-service leader with Apex. The company continues to win market share in the server, storage and PC markets, with annual revenue hitting an all-time high of $94.2 billion in fiscal year 2021.

With more than two decades at the company, it’s safe to say Robbins has Cisco in his blood. The tech veteran has taken Cisco on a journey from being a premier IT hardware provider to a software and cloud-focused behemoth that can serve up IT as a service through its loyal channel partners.

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9

Lisa Su

Enrique Lores

Pat Gelsinger

George Kurtz

Rich Hume

President, CEO

President, CEO

CEO

Co-Founder, President, CEO

CEO

AMD

HP Inc.

Intel

CrowdStrike

Tech Data

AMD was in rough shape when Su took over in 2014. But those days feel like a distant memory now that her bets on the future of high-performance computing are paying off. Su has heralded a new age at AMD, where its CPUs repeatedly outperform Intel’s and ecosystem partners line up to collaborate.

Lores piloted HP Inc. to achieve strong results during the pandemic across its personal systems and print businesses. As demand for PCs and home printers has surged, he has capitalized on the tailwinds by ramping up production and focusing on working closely with partners to meet key customer needs.

In just a few months as Intel’s new CEO, Gelsinger has made it clear that his comeback plan is his most important work yet. He has reinvigorated the employee base, enacted two major reorganizations and set forth a bold, new manufacturing strategy—all in the name of restoring the company’s “unquestioned leadership.”

Kurtz broadened CrowdStrike’s capabilities well beyond endpoint security by pulling off the two most significant acquisitions in company history: access control startup Preempt Security and log management startup Humio. He is now focusing on zero trust expertise and safeguarding cloud workloads.

The seasoned technology sales veteran has emerged as a distribution visionary.

First, Hume took Tech Data private in a $6 billion deal that powered a $750 million investment in next-gen technology. Next up, he pulled together the merger with Synnex that will displace Ingram Micro as the No. 1 distributor.

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Marc Benioff

Dennis Polk

Bill McDermott

Founder, Chairman, CEO

CEO

Salesforce

Synnex

President, CEO ServiceNow

CEO Amazon Web Services

Benioff has taken some big swings in his quest to maintain CRM software dominance.

Multibilliondollar acquisitions, exciting new capabilities for its vast product suite and continued praise of channel partners are all part of his strategy to reach $50 billion in revenue by fiscal year 2026.

Polk did his part to reshape the distribution landscape by leading the charge on the SynnexTech Data merger. That deal was made possible by his decision to spin off the Concentrix services business. Look for Polk to continue to play a big role as the combined company moves to make its mark.

McDermott is used to thinking big and this spring unveiled his plan to triple ServiceNow’s revenue to $15 billion in five years.

He plans to take advantage of what he pegs as a digital transformation market worth $8 trillion as customers look to digitize operations and work with brand-new companies.

The former Tableau Software chief executive rejoined Amazon Web Services this year to succeed Andy Jassy as the second ever CEO of the industry’s largest cloud computing provider, which he helped launch and where he led marketing, sales and support for 11 years from 2005 to 2016.

Hagerman helped customers get a better grip on their IT environment with Sophos XDR, which synchronizes endpoint, server, firewall and email security to provide a holistic view.

He also fortified Sophos’ services muscle with a fixed-fee remote incident response offering.

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Adam Selipsky

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Yang Yuanqing

Ken Xie

George Kurian

Charles Giancarlo

Chairman, CEO

Founder, Chairman, CEO

President, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Lenovo

Fortinet

NetApp

Pure Storage

Yang has overseen the company’s leadership position in the global PC market and continued rise in data centers. Along with driving a channel-first sales push in North America, Lenovo has reorganized its businesses to create more synergies between its PC and data center sides while emphasizing services.

Xie spearheaded the buys of network monitoring vendor Panopta and cloud and network security startup ShieldX to improve visibility into servers, containers, applications and more. He also took on the biggest security issues around working from home and securing SASE deployments with FortiOS 7.0.

Kurian has shown today’s data center infrastructure manufacturers what it will take to turn their companies around in response to the challenges—and the opportunities—of the cloud.

Under Kurian, NetApp is the leader in giving customers free rein to manage data whenever and however they choose.

Giancarlo has been driving the company to turn all of its storage-related technologies into services.

Pure Storage has moved faster than its peers into not only making its technologies available as a service, but in ensuring those services are available only via channel partners.

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Kris Hagerman CEO Sophos

Paul Bay

EVP, President, Global Technology Solutions Ingram Micro

Bay has what few top executives have when their companies get acquired by private equity: freedom.

Ingram Micro was just acquired by Platinum Equity, but Bay and his team have retained the ability to do what they do best, which is to quickly adjust to massive changes facing distribution.

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Mike Long

Rami Rahim

Raghu Raghuram

Thomas Kurian

Chairman, President, CEO

CEO

CEO

CEO

Dan and Michael Schwab

Arrow Electronics

Juniper Networks

VMware

Google Cloud

Co-Presidents

In an IT world characterized by component shortages, Long has been able to use Arrow’s strong supply chain to help vendors mitigate tough supply issues. His insight has made his company one that many have turned to for help, with sales in the last fiscal quarter up 42 percent over last year.

Under Rahim’s direction, Juniper has made some bold moves. The vendor has transformed from a “box company” with a service provider following to an enterprise networking leader with AI baked into its core. Now, Juniper’s enterprise segment is growing more than 20 percent year over year.

Raghuram has hit the ground running after taking the CEO role June 1 following an 18-year tenure at VMware in top engineering and product management roles. His goal is to make VMware the global leader in hybrid and multicloud software while also focusing on Kubernetes and security innovation.

Google Cloud under Kurian continues to capitalize on the company’s strengths in data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning—and increasingly tap into the capabilities and knowledge base of the broader Google—to grow its No. 3 cloud under a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.

D&H Distributing

D&H’s co-presidents have transformed the distributor into a cloud powerhouse and sharpened its ability to develop deep relationships with partners.

Look for the 104-year-old employee-owned distributor to continue to move boldly into the future under their steady hands.

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CHANNEL SALES LEADERS

Hope, a 30-plus-year technology sales veteran, has emerged as the driving force behind HPE’s Everythingas-a-Service channel sales charge. His enterprise technology smarts and channel knowledge are propelling HPE’s GreenLake pay-peruse on-premises cloud service to new channel heights.

Under Hope’s leadership, GEORGE HOPE GreenLake is continuing to Worldwide Head of Partner Sales gain momentum, with total Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake as-a-service order growth up 41 percent in the most recent quarter and 900 partners now selling the cloud service.

Partners credit Hope with maintaining what they are calling industry-leading profitability of the GreenLake channel model with a 17 percent upfront rebate along with monthly recurring revenue participation. Hope calls the robust rebate/recurring revenue model a “two-fer” for partners. “What we have done with GreenLake with our program is give the partner the best of both worlds,” he said.

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2 Bob Lord

Oliver Tuszik

SVP, Worldwide Ecosystems, Blockchain

SVP, Global Partner Sales

IBM

Cisco Systems

Lord is the point person in IBM’s bid to more than double revenue with partners over the next three to five years. Look for the self-described technologist at heart to make big changes that continue to fuel IBM-Red Hat OpenShift sales momentum.

Tuszik has been busy bringing partners along on Cisco’s journey to transition the majority of its portfolio to an as-a-service model, and partners are heeding the call. With Tuszik at the helm of Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, partners are defining the new normal for their customers.

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4 Rola Dagher

Terry Richardson

Global Channel Chief Dell Technologies

North America Channel Chief

Just one year into her role leading Dell Technologies’ massive channel partner business, Dagher has taken partner sales growth and profitability to the next level, including 14 percent growth in channel revenue during its first fiscal quarter. She is now striving to enable partners to sell Dell’s new Apex portfolio.

As AMD has re-established itself in the commercial market, Richardson’s job has been to go the extra mile— and that means becoming a trusted partner in the channel. He has wasted no time defining the “ultimate channel go-to-market strategy” and expanding relationships with AMD’s partners.

AMD

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Doug Yeum

Rodney Clark

Kendra Krause

Donna Grothjan

Jason Kimrey

Head of Worldwide Channels, Alliances

VP, Global Channels

VP, Worldwide Channel Sales

GM, U.S. Channel, Partner Programs

Amazon Web Services

Corporate VP, Global Channel Sales, Channel Chief

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

Intel

Yeum is laser-focused on making it easier for AWS’ 100,000-plus partners to work and grow with the company by launching new initiatives such as the ISV Partner Path and SaaS Boost, and by stressing the importance of speed and differentiation to AWS’ solution providers and ISVs.

Clark was named channel chief April 1 and has set out to tackle priorities including improving digital engagement with partners and accelerating partner tech capability. He is also overseeing new investments that are going directly toward partner profitability.

Microsoft

Sophos

Krause built out a new partner program that streamlined processes and rules of engagement while offering more deal registration opportunities, visibility into level attainment and an MSP revenue multiplier. She also expanded the company’s portfolio of managed services offerings.

Proven channel veteran Grothjan has been heading up Aruba’s channel for over five years. In that time, she’s been driving Aruba’s efforts to enable the delivery of Network as a Service and oversaw the rollout of the Partner Ready for Aruba MSP program in 2020.

Kimrey already had a big job: help lead the U.S. rollout of a new, unified partner program for Intel. But then the pandemic happened and he rose to the occasion, not only helping partners overcome economic uncertainty but also outlining new opportunities that could help them out of the recession.

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2021 TOP 100 EXECUTIVES Eaton Delivers Your Edge Computing Solution Q. Edge computing is on the rise, and it’s driving new market requirements in multiple verticals. What have you seen in the industry regarding moving to the edge and transitioning to hyperconverged infrastructure?

A. Edge computing means recreating the conditions of a data center anywhere while operating remotely—typically without local support. Hyperconverged infrastructure is well-suited for these deployments as its integrated nature makes it a perfect fit for fast rollouts.

The same is true for the physical infrastructure where you need an easily replicated approach to speed up deployments. Being able to pre-integrate the rack enclosure with an IP-enabled lock, environmental sensors and PDU saves valuable time for solution providers while delivering the required “data center in a box” system.

Q. What is Eaton’s strategy from a hardware and software perspective to take advantage of this emerging market?

A. On the hardware side, our focus is on the core market for edge computing, as

most solutions will be hosted in a wall-mount enclosure located in a back-office or on a factory floor. These systems are installed in remote locations and it would be cost prohibitive to roll a truck each time there is a maintenance issue. Despite their higher upfront cost, UPS solutions with lithium-ion batteries offer a great value proposition for these applications. The battery life can last up to 10 years versus three-to-five years, which is in-line with the expected lifespan for most industrial IoT applications.

Furthermore, as remote sites are typically unattended, you need to make sure that there is a solid disaster avoidance strategy. Part of the Eaton Brightlayer Data Centers suite, our IPM software is fully integrated with the latest HCI platforms like DellEMC VxRail, VMware vSAN and Nutanix AHV. IPM can perform an orderly shutdown of clusters (a critical feature for VxRail) and can manage any UPS brand if the customer has a heterogeneous asset base.

Curtiz Gangi

Sales VP, U.S. Channels, Data Center Vertical

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Part of the Eaton Brightlayer Data Centers suite, our IPM software is fully integrated with the latest HCI platforms like DellEMC VxRail, VMware vSAN and Nutanix AHV.

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Christian Alvarez

Scott Lannum

Sandy Hogan

Frank Rauch

SVP, Worldwide Channel Sales

VP, GM, Commercial Sales Organization

SVP, Worldwide Partner, Commercial Organization

Head of Worldwide Channel Sales

Nutanix

HP Inc.

VMware

Alvarez has already won the admiration of Nutanix’s partner community just one year into his global channel leadership role. He was crowned the winner of CRN’s prestigious Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs in 2021, besting 31 of the industry’s most influential channel chiefs.

Lannum’s tenure as the Americas channel chief at HP Inc. has included the launch of the HP Amplify partner program, which features a revamped compensation structure as well as more focus on rewarding partners that can offer services and bring a strong digital presence.

Hogan kept her foot on the gas in 2020 after taking over as VMware’s global channel chief with a focus on getting partners equipped with Master Services Competencies. Her “partner-first” mantra is being built into all of VMware’s strategies.

Check Point Software Technologies

North America Channel Chiefs Lenovo

Rauch strengthened the ties between partners and the field sales organization to maximize channel profitability. He also brought in longtime VMware cloud sales leader Geoff Waters to oversee the field sales operation in North America and Latin America.

Cato and Biondi have been helping to craft the Lenovo 360 global partner program. Set to launch in early 2022, Lenovo 360 will unite the intelligent devices and data center infrastructure businesses in a more cohesive and profitable way for partners.

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Rob Cato and Steve Biondi

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Chris Lamborn

Curtiz Gangi

Carolee Gearhart

Shannon Sbar

Craig Schlagbaum

Head of Global Partner Go To Market, Programs NetApp

Sales VP, U.S. Channels, Data Center Vertical

VP, Worldwide Channels

SVP, Indirect Sales

It’s one thing to say, like NetApp does, that everything is going to the cloud. It’s another thing to make sure that means opening up big opportunities for partners. Lamborn has done just that, and NetApp’s strong channel business is a testament to his vision.

Eaton’s longtime channel champion has overseen a number of recent partner program launches. Gangi continuously updates partner programs around improving sales processes, tying partner certifications to recurring revenue and focusing on new growth areas like edge computing.

Gearhart is instrumental in ensuring Google Cloud’s sales team has highly skilled partners for every workload, vertical and segment as it focuses on achieving a 100 percent go-to-market plan with the channel. She stresses the importance of partners embodying Google Cloud’s flexibility, agility, intelligence and innovation.

VP, Channels, North America Schneider Electric

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Eaton

Google Cloud

Comcast Business

Sbar has been focused on driving channel success at Schneider Electric’s Secure Power division for over 14 years. She has spearheaded recent improvements to the Opportunity Registration Program by increasing discounts and expanding the eligible product categories for partners.

Schlagbaum has more than two decades of experience in the telecom arena and even more as a trusted channel leader. He has been focusing Comcast’s ever-growing partner program by injecting more resources and investments into connectivity offerings as well as more strategic IT services.

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Jon Bove

Gordon Mackintosh

Kevin Rooney

Kimberly King

Wendy Taccetta

VP, Channel Sales

Global Channels, Virtual Sales

VP, Americas Channel Sales

VP, Global Strategic Partners, Alliances

SVP, Nationwide Small Business, Channel Chief

Juniper Networks

Veeam Software

Hitachi Vantara

Verizon Business Group

Mackintosh joined Juniper last year and since then has been making big bets on the channel—to the tune of investing over $100 million. He has added a brand-new program geared toward enterprise sales, as well as a program focused solely on MSPs.

The move to turn all things storage into a service is one heartily embraced by Rooney, who is touting the fact that more than half of Veeam’s revenue now comes via services and subscriptions. Rooney has shown how to make the channel the center of a push toward services.

How do you carve out a channel-focused IoT and analytics play from a channel traditionally focused on storage? You call in King, who has been busy melding the channels of three separate product lines into one and helping partners take advantage of the expanded opportunities they offer.

Twenty-year Verizon executive Taccetta was crowned channel chief of the Verizon Business Group in 2020, and she hasn’t taken a break yet. She has been busy creating better ways for partners to work with the carrier and helping partners see opportunities beyond connectivity.

Fortinet

Bove has driven Fortinet’s expansion from yearly licenses to consumptionbased pricing for six products to reduce capital expenditures for MSPs. He has also expanded the company’s specialization program from four to seven, adding new offerings around zero trust access, OT and security operations.

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2021 TOP 100 EXECUTIVES Ingram Micro: “It’s Not Business As Usual.

It’s Business Accelerated.”

Q. Ingram Micro is now owned by U.S.-based Platinum Equity. What does that mean for your partners and providers globally?

A. Ingram Micro is moving faster, driving more innovation and investing in areas that

will accelerate our partners’ and providers’ success through automation, emerging technologies, business resources and professional services. It’s not business as usual.

It’s business accelerated. We are making investments to increase the value we provide and the success our partners and providers can achieve.

Q. Where is the business growth for Ingram Micro and your channel partners?

A. We’re seeing growth in almost every market segment we compete in including

hardware, software and services. With Platinum Equity in the game, we have an opportunity to really accelerate our growth strategies globally and continue to deliver more value and exceed the expectations of our partners and providers. Our goal remains to serve as an indispensable business partner to the channel.

Q. What is your outlook on the tech industry and the channel specifically?

A. We’ve had two of the best years in our company’s history going into this acquisition

and that speaks volumes for Ingram Micro’s value and the continued and growing role the channel plays in today’s digital economy. This industry is critical to the global economy and core to keeping businesses secure and successful.

Q. Where do you see the most opportunity for today’s channel partners?

Paul Bay

”

EVP and President, Global Technology Solutions

With Platinum Equity in the game, we have an opportunity to really accelerate our growth strategies globally and continue to deliver more value and exceed the expectations of our partners and providers. Our goal remains to serve as an indispensable business partner to the channel.

”

A. The good news is opportunity is everywhere—from the smallest of shops to

the largest of enterprises. And the great news is the best opportunities for many channel partners are within their existing team, their current customer base and their established ecosystem. In my experience, when it comes to business, there is always more to learn and more to earn. Don’t wait for the opportunity. Go after it. Ask for the business and show them how much more you can accomplish together.

The business world is relying on your experience and expertise to work secure from anywhere. Let’s exceed their expectations together. Call your Ingram Micro representative today. www.ingrammicro.com/advancedsolutions

CRN_IngramAug2021__Top100.indd 1

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25 INNOVATORS 2 Huang may have started Nvidia as a provider of specialty silicon for graphics in the 1990s, but the founder has radically expanded the chipmaker’s purview over the past decade and turned the company into the premier provider of accelerated computing solutions for AI, data analytics and beyond. Now he’s embarking on someJENSEN HUANG thing even more radical: Founder, President, CEO turning the GPU maker into Nvidia a “full-stack computing company” by expanding its portfolio to CPUs, networking components, enterprise software and purposebuilt systems, fueled by his belief that the future of data centers is “accelerated-disaggregated infrastructure.” It’s no wonder Intel is taking notes and formulating its own response.

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Kevin Mandia

Jeff Clarke

CEO

Vice Chairman, COO

FireEye

Dell Technologies

Mandia blew the lid off the colossal Russian hack when he revealed FireEye had been breached and days later alerted SolarWinds it was the source of the compromise. He also orchestrated the $1.2 billion sale of FireEye’s product business to Symphony Technology Group, which will separate it from the Mandiant unit.

Clarke has been innovating and modernizing Dell Technologies’ massive portfolio and go-to-market plan at breakneck speed over the years, including the creation of Dell’s new PowerStore storage architecture.

Other than CEO Michael Dell, Clarke is arguably the company’s most critical leader.

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Gerri Elliott

Kumar Sreekanti

EVP, Chief Customer, Partner Officer

CTO, Head of Software

Cisco Systems

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Elliott, one of CEO Chuck Robbins’ right hands, has built up deep expertise in IT. She became Cisco’s firstever executive vice president and chief customer and partner officer in 2018 and has been helping drive its transition to a software and services-focused juggernaut ever since.

Sreekanti is the company’s secret weapon in building out its software-defined edge-to-cloud platform.

He continues to up the ante at HPE with breakthroughs like the Project Aurora zero trust security offering and GreenLake Lighthouse cloud service platform.

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Jeff Teper

Jeff Ready

Danny Allan

Douglas Brockett

Bill Conner

Corporate VP, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive

CEO

CTO

President

President, CEO

Scale Computing

Veeam Software

Arcserve

SonicWall

Scale Computing’s founder and fiery leader has his eyes set on the massive opportunities in edge computing. Ready’s virtualization and HCI innovation charge led to software revenue increasing 45 percent in 2020 year over year, as well as edge deployments growing 110 percent.

Under Allan’s direction, Veeam continues to shake up the market with a full embrace of cloud hyperscalers, application-centric Kubernetes management and more, all wrapped around the Veeam Universal License, which is priced based on instances, not sockets.

Brockett was key to merging old-school data protection vendor Arcserve and new-school rival StorageCraft into a single company under the Arcserve name.

Brockett proved he had the right experience after joining StorageCraft as president following its acquisition of his former company, Exablox.

Conner spearheaded SonicWall’s evolution beyond the firewall to deliver security for the endpoint, email and cloud. He also helped develop Cloud Edge Secure Access to allow customers to control and protect network access to managed and unmanaged devices based on identity, location and device parameters.

Microsoft

The leader of product, design, engineering and customer success for Microsoft 365 since 2015, Teper is the secret sauce for the tech giant’s achievements in collaboration software. Teams is growing faster than just about any other product that Microsoft has created.

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25 INNOVATORS 11

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Rob Rae

Stephen Orban

Michael Gold

Prakash Panjwani

BJ Jenkins

VP, Business Development

GM, AWS Marketplace, Control Services

CEO Intermedia

CEO

President, CEO

WatchGuard Technologies

Barracuda Networks

Datto

Rae has the channel in his soul. In the eight years since he joined Datto, he has leveraged the channel to help grow the company into an MSP powerhouse in large part due to his onstage and in-person presence. He makes the case for the channel better than almost anyone.

Amazon Web Services

As the new leader of AWS Marketplace, the company’s digital catalog of third-party solutions, Orban is training his sights on private marketplace innovation, more industry-specific solutions, improved management and governance features, and international expansion.

Intermedia’s fearless leader has spent the past year bringing the channel-first communications provider global. Gold in 2020 worked to seal a deal with marketleading business phone provider NEC in a partnership that has created a multibillion-dollar opportunity for the company’s allimportant channel partners.

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Panjwani made WatchGuard’s consumption and subscription models available for the endpoint security technology the company acquired from Panda Security. He also championed enhancements to WatchGuard Cloud that make it easier for MSPs to create policy templates.

Jenkins scooped up Fyde to provide secure access to cloud or on-premises applications and workloads and Skout Cybersecurity to give MSPs the technology and manpower to respond effectively to cyberthreats.

He also rolled out the first secure global SD-WAN service built natively on Microsoft Azure.

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Alex Cho

Fred Voccola

Rose Schooler

Tom Black

Avi Shua

President, Personal Systems

CEO

SVP, GM, Storage

Kaseya

Corporate VP, Global Data Center Sales

Co-Founder, CEO Orca Security

Intel

As demand has skyrocketed for devices to meet at-home needs, Cho has accelerated the pace of innovation around laptops, tablets and monitors. For instance, he has overseen the debut of laptops featuring ultraportable form factors and improved collaboration capabilities.

As an outspoken leader, Voccola won’t slow down.

During the pandemic, he put MSPs first by putting money in their pockets so they could efficiently deliver services. And, when Kaseya was hit with the biggest ransomware attack in history in July, he got out in front of the problem and stayed vigilant.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

For Schooler, it’s not enough to just push Intel CPUs in the data center. She wants partners to understand the opportunities, which is why she has launched a strategy around the “cloudification” of the data center that includes new resources for optimizing workloads and deploying new solutions.

Black has completely reinvented the HPE storage experience for partners and customers with one data service breakthrough after another. His latest coup: the pending acquisition of Zerto, which will enable customers to quickly recover from any ransomware attacks.

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HP Inc.

Shua launched Orca into the stratosphere, raising nearly $300 million on a $1.2 billion valuation in just two short years to provide agentless security and compliance for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

He also rolled out Orca’s inaugural partner program.

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Jed Ayres

Brian Breton

Patrick Pulvermueller

Kristin Russell

Rob Johnson

CEO

Regional VP, Americas Channel Sales, Operations

CEO

CEO

Acronis

President, Global Enterprise Computing Solutions

Pulvermueller is a new face at Acronis, having joined the company in July. But he brings to the company a strong channel and cloud focus after time as president of GoDaddy’s partner business, where he led the expansion of its hosting, productivity and security services through agency partners and resellers.

Russell has shown she knows what it takes to help solution providers, MSPs and OEM partners engage with the distributor to bring services to customers and to lean on the company for help in building a wide range of nextgen data center, security, cloud and IoT solutions.

IGEL

Ayres’ transformation of IGEL into the de facto secure edge OS standard on any cloud and any device is resonating deeply with the company’s partners and customers. It’s a compelling story given today’s work-at-home revolution and the current barrage of ransomware attacks.

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RSA

Breton streamlined the procurement process for partners during COVID-19 by removing steps while still ensuring they would receive full benefits for their orders.

He also re-educated the channel on lesser-known ways they could help customers more quickly deploy RSA products and services.

Arrow Electronics

Vertiv

Johnson led Vertiv into the public market last year with plans to double the company’s R&D budget and his sights set on new 5G infrastructure and AI data center opportunities. Under his leadership, Vertiv launched new MSP and as-a-service partner programs this year to drive additional channel growth.

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2021 TOP 100 EXECUTIVES Schneider Electric Leads Edge Innovation And Sustainability Q. Schneider Electric prioritizes sustainability at the edge. How do your products foster this, and how do you keep innovating?

A. To increase sustainability and transparency, Schneider Electric offers many Green

Premium-certified products and services for the edge. The Green Premium certification delivers superior environmental performance by providing complete environmental data compliance with the most ambitious standards globally and sustainability benefits which are all available via the mySchneider App and the online catalog.

Our new ecoDesign offers modular product design, smaller footprint, improved APC Smart-UPS efficiency, long-life energy storage and best practice reference designs.

Partners can build sustainable designs with efficient technologies and solutions.

It’s possible to design a solution lowering energy consumption, saving money and contributing to sustainability goals by reducing waste.

Q. What do the new Schneider Electric software and digital services offers do to drive sustainability and efficiency for the end-user through proper equipment management?

A. At the edge, energy is more than just electricity usage. It includes asset production,

energy consumption and asset maintenance. Schneider Electric’s Edge Software and Digital Services solutions enable IT Solution Providers to manage asset maintenance remotely for their customers by leveraging data power.

IT solution providers who need to deliver and operate sustainable solutions for their customers leverage EcoStruxure IT and remote management services. These solutions provide visibility, monitoring and management capabilities that solution providers can leverage to run efficient edge environments and work toward sustainability goals.

The edge software enables data collection from connected assets to provide visibility of critical systems, track energy usage and provide benchmarking performance.

Monitoring and dispatch services enable partners and end users to manage a fleet of UPS systems spread across multiple remote locations, saving time and reducing operating expenses. These reduce site visits and carbon footprint.

Q. How does Schneider Electric focus on the sustainability of partner business?

A. We recently launched the Edge Software and Digital Services Program, which

enables and supports partners in their new managed power practice, while driving recurring revenue. By adding managed power services to their portfolio, solution providers succeed with critical IT power while staying competitive. Partners have the foundation to offset practice development expenses, elevate team competency and demand in the market, increase profitability for full infrastructure solutions and access tools and resources. Partners grow their practice and manage their needs across the customer lifecycle. Our Partner Success Managers help drive practice development and our tools and communities support them in finding business solutions. Our mission is to be our customer’s digital partner for sustainability and efficiency.

Learn More About The Edge Software And Digital Services Program https://www.apc.com/us/en/partners-alliances/partners/edge-softwaredigital-services-program.jsp

CRN_APC_SchneiderAug2021_Top100.indd 1

Shannon Sbar

”

Vice President of Channels – North America

“We believe sustainability to be meeting the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. Through our programs and offers, we understand the needs of our partners, and enable them to best service their customers in a more sustainable and agile way.

”

2021 7/26/21 9:18 PM

25 DISRUPTERS Weingarten burst onto the scene with the biggest cybersecurity IPO of all time, leading SentinelOne to $1.2 billion of funding on a record-breaking $10 billion valuation. He has driven monster growth at the endpoint security upstart, with sales jumping to $93.1 million in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2021, up over 100 percent from $46.5 million in fiscal TOMER WEINGARTEN 2020. And when it comes to Co-Founder, CEO the channel, Weingarten puts SentinelOne solution providers front and center, with partners accounting for 96 percent of revenue in the most recent fiscal year, up from 92 percent the year prior. He’s also led the charge as SentinelOne pushes its channel enablement capabilities beyond managed services and into managed detection and response and incident response. Under his leadership, SentinelOne stands out in the next-gen security pack with true multitenancy for MSPs and an APIdriven architecture for MDR partners, allowing them to build custom workflows around its technology.

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Jeetu Patel

Keith White

SVP, GM, Security, Collaboration Division

SVP, GM, GreenLake

Cisco Systems

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Former Box product leader Patel brought his insight to Cisco when he joined the company in 2020 to lead its collaboration and security businesses. He has taken the momentous task in stride, with Webex adoption smashing records and the security business seeing double-digit growth.

No one has done more to make HPE GreenLake a force to be reckoned with in the cloud services market than White. Key to HPE’s cloud services’ success is his unbending commitment to HPE partners with deep investment in lead generation and coselling.

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4 Vladimir Rozanovich

Rajiv Ramaswami

SVP, President, North America

President, CEO

Lenovo

Rozanovich, who joined Lenovo in late June following a 24-year career at AMD, has assumed responsibility for all product sales and business groups in North America with a mission to drive Lenovo’s channel-first sales strategy and continue capturing market share from rivals.

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Nutanix

Ramaswami is shaking up Nutanix, positioning the company to become a global software leader by doubling down on scaling through partners as well as increasing its total addressable market. He joined Nutanix from competitor VMware and aims to best his former company in the HCI market.

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David Friend

Eric Yuan

Todd McKinnon

Ryan Walsh

Bill Scannell

President, CEO

Founder, CEO

Co-Founder, CEO

Wasabi

Zoom Video Communications

Okta

Channel Chief, Chief Product Officer

President, Global Sales, Customer Operations

McKinnon pulled the trigger on the most expensive cybersecurity startup acquisition, scooping up Auth0 for $6.5 billion. He also plans to take on the competition with offerings in the identity governance and privileged access management spaces, which are slated to debut in 2022.

Pax8

Dell Technologies

Walsh is a forward thinker who is reinventing distribution and reach throughout the channel in a cloudfirst landscape. In a postpandemic world, Walsh helps drive MSPs to deliver hyper-charged, seamless cloud solutions that continue to be in high demand.

Scannell is Dell Technologies’ longtime sales leader who has his sights set on disrupting the as-a-service market via Dell’s new Apex portfolio. He is now pushing Dell and its partners to win customer wallet share from public cloud rivals through Apex’s cost savings and flexible offerings.

Friend has proven himself a true “friend” to the channel and to the channel-focused cloud storage business with his dogged determination to keep cloud storage prices as low as possible and to partner with any vendor needing cloud storage on the back end.

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Former Cisco Webex executive Yuan had a vision for simple collaboration, and his launch of Zoom paid off during the pandemic when it became, quite literally, an overnight success. He is now spearheading the blockbuster $14.7 billion acquisition of contact center specialist Five9.

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25 DISRUPTERS 11 Eric Martorano

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Matthew and Peter Cassar

Sanjay Beri

Paul Cormier

Jason Magee

Chief Revenue Officer

Founder, CEO

President, CEO

CEO

Nextiva

Co-Founders, Co-CEOs

Netskope

Red Hat

ConnectWise

As one of the top executives at Nextiva, a provider of UCaaS targeting SMBs, Martorano has had his hands full aggressively growing the business over the last year. Under his direction, the channelfriendly company is working hard to zero in on new opportunities through solution providers.

Sherweb

Beri turned Netskope into the world’s second mostvaluable venture-backed cybersecurity company, raising $300 million on a $7.5 billion valuation to drive product and go-tomarket investment around SASE. He also formulated the industry’s first accreditation course to address SASE design requirements.

IBM touts Red Hat as a cornerstone in its cloud strategy. The two companies still have separate partner programs, but Cormier is steadfast about Red Hat partners’ essential role in his company’s trajectory. And partners in turn have praised his leadership.

Magee has ensured security is one of the top drivers of ConnectWise’s past and potentially future acquisitions and is central to its core business model. He has also overseen new innovation such as the upcoming BrightGauge Essentials, out-of-the-box dashboards that give MSPs immediate insight into their business.

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The Cassars are laserfocused on providing top-tier services and products to MSP partners. To strengthen Sherweb’s cybersecurity footprint, the co-CEOs earlier this year launched Office Protect, which manages detection and response capabilities for Microsoft 365 users.

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Maria Martinez

Joyce Mullen

Jay Chaudhry

Nikesh Arora

Kevin Lynch

EVP, COO

President, North America

Founder, Chairman, CEO

Chairman, CEO

Cisco Systems

Insight Enterprises

Zscaler

Palo Alto Networks

CEO Optiv

Martinez has prioritized the customer experience throughout Cisco since she began at the company in 2018. After being promoted to COO this year, she hasn’t shied away from her increasingly full plate, which includes overseeing customer success, renewals, and the customer and partner experience.

After leading Dell Technologies’ massive channel business for years, Mullen jumped to Insight less than a year ago with the goal of driving sales growth by delivering more value and business outcomes for customers. She is now focused on building upon its portfolio of Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions.

Chaudhry acquired Trustdome to get control over who and what has access to data, applications and services, as well as Smokescreen Technologies to proactively hunt for emerging adversary tactics.

He also created Zscaler ZPA Private Service Edge to securely broker users to private applications.

Arora broadened Palo Alto Networks’ capabilities through the purchases of Expanse and Bridgecrew. The company also devised a service that helps prevent data breaches, facilitates regulatory compliance and inhibits risky user behavior to protect sensitive data.

Lynch moved Optiv—one of the most well-respected security solution providers in the world—beyond traditional IT by creating an Enterprise IoT Lab that shows customers how to discover IoT devices present in their environment and mitigate outstanding security issues.

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Prentiss Donohue

Gajen Kandiah

C.R. Howdyshell

Charlie Tomeo

Jon Kabrud

EVP, SMB, Commercial Sales

CEO

President

Chief Revenue Officer

Hitachi Vantara

Advizex

Axcient

Director, U.S. MSP Channel Sales

When Kandiah joined Hitachi Vantara in July 2020, he took over a company that had gone through a massive transition from a storagecentric vendor to a leader in IoT and analytics. But that wasn’t enough: Kandiah in March oversaw the $9.6 billion acquisition of GlobalLogic as a way to transform even further.

Howdyshell is at the vanguard of today’s red-hot Everything-as-a-Service channel revolution. Advizex has become the single point of accountability for its customers with a best-of-breed, single-bill consumption-based offering, earning honors as HPE’s As-A-Service Partner Of The Year.

Axcient is making security a key part of its push to embrace the cloud for data protection, and Tomeo is front and center when it comes to taking its technology to partners. He was the highest-level executive in a string of Webroot personnel hired by Axcient to beef up security around data protection.

Kabrud drew up the company’s inaugural partner program to bring enterpriselevel services to SMB and midmarket solution providers in a profitable and predictable manner. He is laser-focused on rewarding partners that grow with ADT Cybersecurity by providing them with more resources.

OpenText

Donohue helped develop Webroot Business Management Console 6.0 to give MSPs and SMBs a more streamlined user experience when optimizing, executing and managing key layers of security. He also championed OpenText’s managed detection and response service to help customers uncover hidden risks.

ADT Cybersecurity

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A D VE RT I S E M E N T

2021 EMERGING

VENDORS How Avita Pharmacy Standardized Video Security Across 30 Locations With Verkada Q. What can you tell us about Verkada?

A. Verkada is one of the fastest growing physical security companies in the world. We’re

moving physical security to the cloud and are backed by many top venture capital firms.

Our last fundraising round valued us at $1.6 billion.

Q. What challenges was Avita Pharmacy facing that Verkada helped to solve?

A. Avita Pharmacy was having a hard time maintaining different video security hardware for multiple sites and centrally managing and viewing all these systems.

Marshall Frost, VP of Corporate Systems at Avita Pharmacy told us “Legacy systems often have multiple types of hardware that are older or non-standard, which makes them difficult to support. Worst case scenario is that an incident happens, and you find the camera or NVR wasn’t recording the whole time.”

Due to Avita Pharmacy’s rapid expansion, Frost sought to centralize video security onto one platform to scale and simplify management across multiple sites. With Verkada’s solution, he provides end-users with secure remote access and customizes their permissions based on roles and locations. Cameras are automatically configured and bandwidth-friendly at 20 kbps, enabling easy deployment to remote locations.

Gaps in coverage are no longer a concern and footage is saved on board the camera to solid-state drives and to cloud-based servers hosted by AWS. For faster incident resolution, he now can apply advanced search features and real-time alerts to be instantly notified of system health issues or meaningful after-hours activity.

Frost said “Verkada was very simple to install and configure, which is one of our top priorities as an organization in expansion mode—we need to make the process of setting up new pharmacies quick and simple. With Verkada, we basically plug the camera into a network jack with PoE, point it in the right direction and set up the rest of it from the centralized command platform.”

Verkada’s Hybrid Cloud Architecture

Matt Gidney

”

Director of Channel

Cloud-based physical security is a massive market opportunity for channel partners that already sell to IT teams. There are many companies like Avita Pharmacy who need help standardizing their physical security.

We are a 100 percent channel company and look forward to helping you unlock these new opportunities.

”

Watch our demo to get a free YETI and learn more about our solution! https://www.verkada.com/webinars/crn

Verkada_Aug2021__EmergingVendors.indd 1

7/26/21 11:23 AM

CR N E M E RG I NG VE N DOR S

Startups Set The Pace

By Rick Whiting

S

OLUTION PROVIDERS OFTEN turn to established IT vendors and their expansive product portfolios when addressing their customers’ technology needs.

But in the fast-moving IT industry some—perhaps even many—of the most innovative ideas and technologies come from startups. Unencumbered by legacy products or legacy thinking, startups develop leading-edge technologies to tackle IT opportunities that the established vendors may not yet recognize.

Startups often set the pace in segments of the IT industry where technology development is moving the fastest, including big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, networking, security and storage.

Solution providers looking for a competitive edge should take note of startups with breakthrough technologies that create opportunities to develop innovative, high-value offerings for customers.

Here we present the CRN 2021 Emerging Vendors, 126 startups founded in 2015 or more recently with annual sales of less than $1 billion that are working with channel partners in North America.

Some companies on this year’s list have already established a presence in the industry. Cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies has made a name for itself as it competes against Amazon Web Services and other giants, for example, while threat detection and response technology developer Huntress has attracted attention amid this year’s wave of cybersecurity attacks.

Others are just getting off the ground but are already making waves. Machine learning tech developer Tecton, which exited stealth last year, is generating serious buzz in Silicon Valley.

For evidence of the potential value of IT startups, one only need look at the venture capital that has flowed to some. SambaNova Systems, a developer of advanced hardware/software systems for running AI applications, raised a stunning $676 million in funding in May, putting its pre-money valuation at more than $5 billion.

Security startups have been especially hot: In March alone Axonious raised $100 million in funding while Aqua Security raised $135 million, Orca Security raised $210 million and Snyk raised $300 million.

“Our relentless focus on the experience of the 2.2 million

developers building applications of all kinds securely with Snyk has resulted in our success to date, and we believe there is an exponential, generational opportunity still in front of us,” said Snyk CEO Peter McKay at the time of the investment.

Another indicator of the value of IT startups is how many are acquired by bigger, more established IT vendors.

In May, for example, Cisco Systems struck a deal to buy Socio Labs with an eye toward using its events technology to enhance Webex services. And in June Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought Determined AI to boost its own high-performance computing and machine learning offerings.

Startup acquisitions in the cybersecurity space have been especially frequent this year. Fortinet acquired cloud and network security startup ShieldX in March, Zscaler bought deception technology startup Smokescreen in May and Microsoft acquired IoT security startup ReFirm Labs in June. The price tags hint at the value of these startups: JFrog paid $300 million in June to buy security startup Vdoo while Rapid7 just acquired security startup IntSights for $335 million.

Startups have traditionally focused on selling directly to a limited number of customers, not turning to the channel until they are well along in expanding their sales efforts. But today they are turning to the channel earlier, recognizing that solution providers can introduce a startup and its products to their customers and devise real-world solutions around leading-edge technology.

Starburst, which develops big data analytics software, launched its Starburst Orbit channel program in late 2020 to recruit and support systems integrator, reseller and consulting partners. “We want to build a partner-first and ecosystem-centric company [and] embed it into our culture early on and into our go-to-market approach,” said Harrison Johnson, head of partnerships at Starburst, in an interview with CRN. The following is the complete list of 2021 Emerging Vendors, organized by technology, along with a snapshot description of each. More details about these companies are available by scanning here.

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2021 Big Data

Emerging Vendors The List

Data is a critical component of digital transformation initiatives. Startups are developing a new generation of tools to collect, integrate, prepare, manage and analyze big data.

Ahana

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Steven Mih, Co-Founder, CEO

Ahana’s cloud-native managed service for the Presto distributed SQL query engine for Amazon Web Services simplifies the deployment, management and integration of Presto for self-service SQL analytics for data analysts and scientists.

Dremio

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Billy Bosworth, CEO

Dremio’s data lake engine delivers data warehouse functionality to cloud data lakes through direct queries for high-performing interactive dashboards and analytics, eliminating the need to copy data into data warehouses.

Kyligence

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Luke Han, Co-Founder, CEO

Kyligence provides an intelligent analytics performance layer between data sources and BI tools, ensuring peak performance, vastly simplified data modeling and sub-second query response time for BI, SQL, OLAP and Excel users.

Promethium

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Kaycee Lai, Founder, CEO

Promethium’s augmented data management system aut mates the data analytics process by connecting on-premises and cloud data without moving or copying it and automating data preparation, assembly and visualization tasks.

Spell.ML

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Serkan Piantino, Co-Founder, CEO

Spell.ML’s platform goes beyond traditional machine learn ng with its capabilities for preparing, training, deploying and managing the full life cycle of machine learning and deep learning models.

Aparavi

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Adrian Knapp, Founder, CEO

Aparavi’s cloud-based data intelligence and automation platform finds, governs and consolidates distributed data needed for analytics, machine learning and collaboration tasks, helping transform data into a competitive asset.

Equalum

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Nir Livneh, CEO

Equalum is a cloud-agnostic data integration platform offering end-to-end data replication, ETL ingestion and batch ingestion within a no-code UI. Equalum orchestrates Apache Spark, Kafka and others within the platform engine.

Monte Carlo

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Barr Moses, Co-Founder, CEO

Mission-critical data used for decision-making and powering digital products must be accurate and reliable. Monte Carlo solves the costly problem of broken data through its fully automated, SOC-2-certified data observability platform.

Rivery

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Itamar Ben Hemo Co-Founder, CEO

Rivery’s cloud DataOps and data management platform gives companies control over their organizational data.

Rivery’s approach to DataOps incorporates automation and actionable logic into ETL/ELT processes.

Starburst

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Justin Borgman, Co-Founder, CEO

Starburst’s SQL query engine, based on open-source Trino, provides data access and analytics for organizations of all sizes. Starburst queries data across any source, making it instantly actionable for data-driven organizations.

Cockroach Labs

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Spencer Kimball, CEO

Cockroach Labs develops CockroachDB, a high-performance, cloud-native, distributed SQL database that’s used by companies of all sizes—and the apps they develop—to “scale fast, survive anything and thrive everywhere.”

Fluree

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Brian Platz, Co-Founder, Co-CEO

Fluree’s graph database uses blockchain technology to buildtransactions into cryptographically secured chains of graphstructured data. Target applications include master data management transformation for supply chains and more.

Prodoscore

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Sam Naficy, CEO

Prodoscore’s software provides visibility into employee productivity and engagement in a simple score. The system captures and measures thousands of daily activities across cloudbased business apps to provide productivity intelligence.

Rockset

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Venkat Venkataramani, CEO

Rockset enables interactive real-time analytics for logistics tracking, security and more. Its approach makes analytics fast, flexible and easy by indexing every field in structured, semi-structured, geo or time series data.

Tecton

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Mike Del Balso, Co-Founder, CEO

Tecton’s data platform enables data scientists to turn raw data into the predictive signals that power machine learning models, helping remove the biggest machine learning impediment that enterprises face.

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2021

Emerging Vendors

Big Data continued Tellius

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Ajay Khanna, Founder, CEO

The Tellius decision intelligence platform provides faster insight from data, combining AI- and machine learningdriven automation with a search interface that lets users ask questions of business data across billions of records.

Cloud

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Bill Cook, CEO

YugabyteDB is an open-source, high-performance distri uted SQL database for building global internet-scale applications. It serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance and cloud-native agility.

Emerging vendors are developing the technologies needed to build, manage and automate today’s hybrid cloud and multi-cloud architectures and the enterprise applications that run across them.

Amperity

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Kabir Shahani, Co-Founder, CEO

Amperity develops a customer data platform that leverages AI to develop a unified view of customers for a range of customer identity management and multichannel customer engagement applications.

Coder

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Ammar Bandukwala, Co-Founder, CEO

DevSecOps startup Coder offers its developer workspace platform for moving software development to the cloud, centralizing development initiatives, and improving developer speed and enterprise security.

Kublr

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Oleg Chunikhin, Co-Founder, CTO

Kublr develops an enterprise-grade Kubernetes manag ment platform that automates the deployment and management of production-ready, secured Kubernetes clusters and environments.

Morpheus Data

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Jeff Drazan, CEO

Morpheus offers a cloud application management and orchestration platform, giving IT managers, developers and DevOps professionals control over virtual machines and container-based systems across any cloud or IT infrastructure.

30

Yugabyte

Auditoria.AI

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Rohit Gupta, Co-Founder, CEO

Auditoria.AI is pioneering “autonomous finance” with an AI-driven SaaS offering for corporate finance teams.

Auditoria automates back-office business processes and accelerates cash performance.

Edgeworx

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Kilton Hopkins, Co-Founder, CEO

Edgeworx’s hardware and software development system, including Darcy Cloud PaaS and Darcy Edge Platform, is designed for deploying and managing applications and containerized microservices from the cloud to the edge.

Liongard

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Joe Alapat, Co-Founder, CEO

Liongard’s Roar IT automation platform gives MSPs co plete IT visibility into cloud and on-premises systems, networks, applications and services by discovering, auditing and documenting the entire IT stack.

Nerdio

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Vadim Vladimirskiy, CEO

Nerdio was founded to help MSPs and enterprises build uccessful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure. Its offerings empower MSPs and IT professionals to deploy, manage and optimize Windows Virtual Desktop environments.

Cameyo

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Andrew Miller, Co-Founder, CEO

Cameyo’s secure virtual application delivery platform for digital workspaces provides a simple, secure and costeffective way to deliver Windows and internal web applications to devices from the browser without the need for VPNs.

Isovalent

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Daniel Wendlandt, Co-Founder, CEO

Isovalent‘s Cilium provides eBPF-based networking, observability and security with optimal scale and performance for platform teams operating Kubernetes environments across cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

LucidLink

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Peter Thompson, Co-Founder, CEO

LucidLink’s Filespaces is a secure, high-performance file sy tem that transforms the cloud into a local storage system— providing direct access to files stored in the cloud from anywhere—and streams them to applications on demand.

Nobl9

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Marcin Kurc, CEO

Nobl9’s platform helps software developers, DevOps pra titioners and engineers deliver reliable features faster through software-defined service-level objectives that link monitoring, logging and tracing data to user satisfaction.

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Emerging Vendors

Observe

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Jeremy Burton, CEO

Observe, which emerged from stealth in October 2020, has developed a platform that monitors the performance of SaaS applications by collecting and monitoring application output such as log data, metrics and traces.

Pensando Systems Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Prem Jain, Co-Founder, CEO

Pensando offers a next-generation distributed computing system that delivers software-defined services to the edge, transforming enterprise IT infrastructure into cloud-like environments that securely extend to the public cloud.

vFunction

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Moti Rafalin, Co-Founder, CEO

The vFunction platform for software developers and architects automatically transforms complex monolithic Java applications into microservices, helping companies accelerate their journey to cloud-native architecture.

Data Center

Observe.AI

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Swapnil Jain, Co-Founder, CEO

Observe.AI develops an AI-powered agent enablement platform for voice customer service. Leveraging speech and natural language processing, organizations can evaluate customer interactions and analyze contact center performance.

Prosimo

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Ramesh Prabagaran, Co-Founder, CEO

Prosimo exited stealth in April with its Application eXperience Infrastructure platform that is designed to modernize and simplify application delivery across multicloud environments.

Wasabi Technologies Founded: 2015 Top Executive: David Friend, CEO

Wasabi is delivering disruptive storage technology that is one-fifth the price of Amazon S3 and faster than the competition with no egress fees. Wasabi says it’s on a mission to commoditize the storage industry.

2021

PacketFabric

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Dave Ward, CEO

PacketFabric’s Network as a Service leverages a scalable private optical network, packet switching technology and automation to deliver on-demand, private and secure connectivity between colocation facilities and cloud providers.

TriggerMesh

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Mark Hinkle, Co-Founder, CEO

TriggerMesh’s cloud-native integration platform ties together cloud, SaaS and on-premises applications. Developers can build applications that are composed of services from multiple cloud providers and on-premises systems.

WireWheel

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Justin Antonipillai, Founder, CEO

WireWheel develops data privacy management technology that helps businesses comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California across their onpremises and cloud data stores.

To meet the ever-increasing demands for more compute power, startups are creating next-generation servers, AI-based processors and advanced memory systems—and software that utilizes all that power.

Bamboo Systems

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Tony Craythorne, CEO

Bamboo Systems’ next-generation Arm-based Parallel Arm Node Designed Architecture servers run Linux applications and save up to 50 percent of acquisition costs and 75 percent of energy consumption compared with x86-based servers.

Pliops

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Uri Beitler, Co-Founder, CEO

The Pliops Storage Processor’s key value-based technology enables data-intensive applications to access data up to 100 times faster using just a fraction of the computational load and power consumption of traditional systems.

Kandji

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Adam Pettit, Founder, CEO

Kandji’s Apple software focuses on managing time-consuming device management tasks such as renaming devices and meeting security and compliance requirements. Its offering has over 200 prebuilt automations.

Quantum Computing

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Robert Liscouski, President, CEO

Quantum Computing is working to apply its technology to real-world business solutions. Qatalyst, the company’s flagship software, bridges traditional and quantum computing to help solve complex computation problems.

MemVerge

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Charles Fan, Co-Founder, CEO

MemVerge’s Memory Machine software virtualizes memory for enterprise-class in-memory data services, allowing applications with large volumes of data to take advantage of abundant, persistent and highly available pools of memory.

SambaNova Systems Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Rodrigo Liang, Co-Founder, CEO

SambaNova builds advanced integrated hardware/software systems for running AI applications from the data center to the cloud and the edge, commercializing AI innovations developed by advanced research organizations.

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2021

Emerging Vendors

Data Center continued Internet of Things

As IoT networks expand, businesses are looking for better deployment and management tools and for next-generation IoT applications. Here are some startups creating the technologies they need.

EdgePresence

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Doug Recker, Founder, CEO

EdgePresence operates multitenant, edge computing data centers that provide space, power, bandwidth, points of presence and interconnection capabilities for businesses looking to implement a dynamic edge compute strategy.

Samsara

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Sanjit Biswas, CEO

Samsara’s Connected Operations Platform and related products allow businesses with physical operations, including transportation, manufacturing, construction and utility companies, to harness IoT data to develop business insight.

Networking/Unified Communications

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Orr Danon, CEO

Hailo develops a high-performance AI microprocessor for edge devices. The Hailo-8 processor, designed to compute and interpret huge amounts of data in real time, targets applications in manufacturing, automotive and smart cities.

Kinettix

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Chad Mattix, Founder, CEO

Working with IT vendors and partners, Kinettix provides IT field technicians and break/fix services for installing, maintaining and retiring IT assets and devices, both on-site and remote.

Zededa

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Said Ouissal, Founder, CEO

Zededa provides visibility and security for distributed edge operations. Its cloud-based orchestration system deploys and manages any application on any hardware—at scale—and connects to the cloud and on-premises systems.

Emerging vendors are taking SD-WAN, 5G wireless, Network as a Service and nextgeneration voice and video to the next level, keeping employees in an increasingly dispersed workforce in communication with each other.

Alkira

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Amir Khan, Founder, CEO

Alkira emerged from stealth in 2020 with its consumptionbased Cloud Services Exchange, a unified, on-demand offering that lets cloud architects and network engineers build and deploy a multi-cloud network in minutes.

For2Fi

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Andrew Gregoire, CEO

For2Fi is bringing high-speed wireless 4G LTE service to hard-to-reach businesses and those that need immediate telecommunications and internet connectivity. It provides wireless, managed LTE and satellite offerings via the channel.

NetFoundry

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Galeal Zino, Co-Founder, CEO

NetFoundry’s SaaS platform is accessed via APIs, SDKs and DevOps tool integrations, enabling businesses to connect applications without the cost and complexity of VPNs, custom hardware and private circuits.

32

Hailo

Ananda Networks

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Adi Ruppin, Co-Founder, CEO

Ananda aims to rebuild corporate networks to meet distributed workforce and edge computing needs. Its Secure Global LAN service helps customers create their own private networks, connecting users, devices and cloud services.

Geoverse

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Roderick Nelson, CEO

Geoverse designs, deploys and operates private LTE networks for business customers. Its private 5G/LTE wireless network lets users and devices roam across public carrier networks seamlessly and securely.

Pidj.co

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Erik Drumm, CEO

Pidj.co’s marketing and customer engagement platform empowers organizations to connect with customers in real time via automated and two-way text messages on their mobile devices.

Celona

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Rajeev Shah, Co-Founder, CEO

Celona provides a fully integrated offering for building enterprise private mobile networks. Its platform provides everything from SIM cards to mobile core technology for building private LTE or 5G networks to power applications.

Infiot

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Parag Thakore, CEO

Infiot provides a cloud-delivered, wireless edge service that converges remote network connectivity using SD-WAN, zero trust network access, edge compute and predictive insight.

Turing Video

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Jerry Zhong, Co-Founder, President

Turing Video provides business intelligence and insight using AI-enabled analytics, improving workplace safety and security and boosting operational efficiency in the grocery, hospitality, financial and education spaces.

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Emerging Vendors

Ultatel

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Amr Ibrahim, Founder, CEO

Ultatel develops the cloud-based Clarity UC phone offering, providing voice, video, fax, SMS and audio-conferencing capabilities in one system. Its 40-plus features allow users to seamlessly operate across single and multiple locations.

UX2D

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Brian Russell, President

UX2D’s SaaS-based content management system provides simplified scalability for digital signage networks. The system deploys and updates digital signage content, including video and high-resolution images.

2021

Vcinity

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Harry Carr, CEO

Vcinity’s data connectivity platform resolves the challenges of working with geographically dispersed data regardless of distance, volume, application or network capacity, integrating compute, networking and storage operations.

Zammo.ai

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Alex Farr, Founder, CEO

Zammo.ai’s AI-powered voice computing system is a no-code SaaS platform for building voice applications and chatbots that automate business through voice commands and can be deployed with one click across all conversation channels.

Security

New technologies to manage, back up and protect IT networks are increasingly under attack from cybercriminals. data assets These startups are developing technology to secure IT systems, networks, applications and data in the data center and the cloud.

AaDya Security

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Raffaele Mautone, Founder, CEO

AaDya provides simple and effective cybersecurity offerings for SMBs. Its all-in-one platform, powered by an AI and machine learning assistant/agent, provides 24/7, enterprise-grade protection and support.

AppOmni

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Brendan O’Connor, Co-Founder, CEO

AppOmni is a provider of SaaS security management software. Its patented technology provides comprehensive security for enterprise SaaS environments and helps protect against the most common SaaS vulnerabilities.

Axis Security

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Dor Knafo, Founder, CEO

Axis Security’s zero trust SASE platform provides secure access to applications without the need for VPNs, network changes or agents on every device, making zero trust application access simple and secure.

Blumira

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Steve Fuller, Co-Founder, CEO

Blumira develops cloud-based automated threat detection and response technology. Its platform helps midmarket organizations with limited security resources to detect and respond to cybersecurity threats in near-real-time.

Accurics

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Sachin Aggarwal, Co-Founder, CEO

Accurics enables compliance, governance and security across cloud-native infrastructure throughout the DevOps life cycle.

Its platform programmatically detects and fixes cloud infrastructure misconfigurations in design, build and runtime.

Aqua Security

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Dror Davidoff, Co-Founder, CEO

Aqua Security develops a cloud-native security platform for the entire application stack—from development to production—across virtual machines, containers and serverless workloads.

Axonious

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Dean Sysman, Co-Founder, CEO

Axonious focuses on cybersecurity asset management.

Through integration with more than 300 vendor tools, it creates a comprehensive asset inventory, uncovers security coverage gaps, and validates and enforces security policies.

Cigent Technology

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Bradley Rowe, Co-Founder, CEO

Cigent Data Defense protects data even after a security breach.

Self-defending SSDs provide advanced cybersecurity as close to data as possible, and zero trust multifactor authentication protects endpoint, network, cloud and shared data.

Adlumin

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Robert Johnson, CEO

Adlumin’s advanced security and compliance automation platform is built for corporate organizations that demand commercial bank-grade innovative cybersecurity offerings and easy-to-use comprehensive reporting tools.

Armis

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Yevgeny Dibrov, Co-Founder, CEO

The Armis agentless, enterprise-class security platform addresses the threat landscape of unmanaged and IoT devices. Armis discovers devices on and off a network and analyzes device behavior to identify risks and attacks.

BlueVoyant

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Jim Rosenthal, CEO

Managed cybersecurity company BlueVoyant works with channel partners to provide endpoint detection and incident response, vulnerability management, cyber-risk management, digital risk protection and cyberforensics services.

Confluera

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: John Morgan, CEO

Confluera’s cloud cybersecurity detection and response platform tracks the sequence of cyberattack steps in real time. Its machine learning technology automates correlating events and removes the complexity of manually analyzing systems.

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2021

Emerging Vendors

Security continued CryptoStopper

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Greg Edwards, CEO

CryptoStopper automatically detects and stops actively running ransomware attacks. The company’s offering is delivered through and supported by MSPs and MSSPs.

CyberSaint Security

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Robert Forman, CEO

CyberSaint empowers organizations to build actionable and measurable cybersecurity programs. Its CyberStrong platform empowers security teams and CISOs to measure, mitigate and communicate risk.

Deepwatch

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Charlie Thomas, CEO

Deepwatch protects enterprise networks and digital assets, 24/7/365. Its highly automated, cloud-based SOC platform—backed by a team of experts—extends security teams and proactively improves cybersecurity posture.

Enso Security

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Roy Erlich, Co-Founder, CEO

The Enso Security application security posture management platform creates an actionable, unified inventory of all application assets, their owners and the associated risk, allowing software security groups to protect applications.

Immersive Labs

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: James Hadley, CEO

The Immersive Labs platform helps large companies and government organizations upskill and measure the effectiveness of human cyberassets, ensuring cybersecurity personnel and development teams have the expertise they need.

JupiterOne

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Erkang Zheng, CEO

JupiterOne’s management and governance offering provides visibility into an organization’s cyberasset universe, allowing enterprises in the SaaS, financial and health-care industries to ensure they are compliant and secure.

Cyberbit

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Adi Dar, CEO

Cyberbit is a top provider of cybersecurity skills development offerings. Its platform provides simulation-based skilling, training and assessments for SOC professionals and is proven to dramatically increase security team performance.

CyCognito

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Rob Gurzeev, Co-Founder, CEO

The CyCognito platform delivers attack surface protection by combining advanced external attack surface management capabilities with automated multifactor testing to discover the paths of least resistance attackers use.

Defendify

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Andrew Rinaldi, Co-Founder

Defendify streamlines cybersecurity for organizations without security teams. Its all-in-one platform continuously strengthens cybersecurity posture across people, processes and technology through automation.

Ermetic

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Shai Morag, CEO

Businesses using public cloud platforms are exposed to security risks from excessive permissions extended to human and machine identities. Ermetic enables automatic discovery and mitigation of access- and entitlement-related risks.

IntSights

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Guy Nizan, Co-Founder, CEO

IntSights provides external cyberthreat intelligence capabilities that enable security teams to defend against an evolving threat landscape while significantly reducing security team workloads. Rapid7 acquired IntSights in July for $335 million.

Karamba Security

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Ami Dotan, Co-Founder, CEO

Karamba offers software and services to protect connected IoT and edge devices from cyberattacks without making changes to R&D processes, supply chain modules, operating systems or hardware.

CyberGRX

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Fred Kneip, CEO

The CyberGRX platform uses advanced automation to provide comprehensive third-party cyber-risk management and identify, assess, mitigate and monitor an organization’s risk exposure across its vendor, partner and customer ecosystem.

Dasera

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Ani Chaudhuri, Co-Founder, CEO

Dasera enables safe use of sensitive data by securing the entire data life cycle in cloud data stores. It detects where sensitive data is stored, tracks data lineage, understands how data is used and highlights risky behaviors.

DoControl

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Adam Gavish, Co-Founder, CEO

DoControl helps organizations prevent data breaches and achieve balance between security and business enablement on SaaS applications. It provides the tools security teams need for data access monitoring, orchestration and remediation.

Huntress

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Kyle Hanslovan, Co-Founder, CEO

The Huntress ThreatOps platform focuses on a specific set of attack surfaces, vulnerabilities and exploits, helping IT service providers find and stop hidden threats that get past preventive security tools.

Ivanti

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Jim Schaper, CEO

From mobile devices to virtual desktop infrastructure, Ivanti’s automation platform discovers, manages, secures and services IT assets from cloud to endpoints, enabling corporate data to flow across devices and servers.

Lightspin

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Vladi Sandler, Co-Founder, CEO

Lightspin’s contextual cloud security platform protects cloud and Kubernetes environments from build to runtime, examining an organization’s cloud environment from an attacker perspective to identify, prioritize and fix open attack paths.

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2021

Emerging Vendors

Security continued Lucidum

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Joel Fulton, CEO

The Lucidum asset discovery platform eliminates blind spots across cloud, security and IT operations. Fortune 500 companies rely on its patent-pending machine learning technology to discover, triangulate, identify and secure all IT assets.

Obsidian Security

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Hasan Imam, CEO

Obsidian’s cloud detection and response technology closes security and compliance gaps across interconnected SaaS applications like Salesforce, Workday and Microsoft 365, protecting against insider threats, access misuse and data leaks.

Ordr

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Greg Murphy, President, CEO

The Ordr platform provides real-time asset inventory, behavior profiling and automated policies to secure all devices—including traditional IT devices, IoT devices and operation technology—and enforce zero trust policies.

Privafy

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Guru Pai, Co-Founder, CEO

Privafy’s Security as a Service creates a secure, private network on public networks, providing security for data in motion. Privafy offerings incorporate encryption, firewall and identity endpoint technology.

Refactr

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Michael Fraser, Co-Founder, CEO

The Refactr DevSecOps automation platform enables collaboration between DevOps and cybersecurity teams. Refactr helps organizations modernize and continuously automate securely and seamlessly.

Satori

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Eldad Chai, Co-Founder, CEO

Satori’s Universal Data Access service helps organizations move away from legacy data administration to modern DataSecOps. The cloud-native platform finds and classifies data from a single control plane, improving data access.

36

Medigate

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Jonathan Langer, Co-Founder, CEO

Netography

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Barrett Lyon, Co-Founder, CEO

Medigate’s Device Security Platform provides health-care delivery organizations with the insight, protection and analytics needed to ensure operations run smoothly. MDSP provides actionable insight that drives informed decisions.

Netography provides network detection and response capabilities to defend against global threats. It helps companies gain visibility into on-premises, cloud and hybrid network environments to eliminate blind spots.

One Identity

Orca Security

One Identity helps organizations achieve identity-centered security. Its broad and integrated portfolio of identity governance and privileged access management offerings help place identities at the core of security initiatives.

Orca Security’s cloud-native offering provides workloaddeep security and compliance for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. It detects malware, misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities without any gaps in coverage.

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Patrick Nichols, CEO

Perimeter 81

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Amit Bareket, Co-Founder, CEO

Perimeter 81 is a secure Network-as-a-Service provider, helping organizations rapidly scale their networks and ensure secure remote access, regardless of where and how their employees work.

QuoLab Technologies Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Daniel Young, President, CEO

QuoLab develops a data-centric security operations platform for analyzing, investigating and responding to threats within an integrated ecosystem. Its technology fuses external threat intelligence, internal data sources and user-supplied data.

Remediant

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Timothy Keeler, Founder, CEO

Remediant SecureOne enables agentless discovery and removal of unnecessary administrative access from endpoints. Organizations add privileged access with multifactor authentication for zero trust security, reducing attack surfaces.

ShardSecure

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Bob Lam, Co-Founder, CEO

ShardSecure uses microshard technology to automatically shred, mix and distribute data, eliminating sensitivity and reducing the attack surface. ShardSecure provides data security, privacy and compliance beyond encryption.

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Avi Shua, Co-Founder, CEO

Privacera

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Balaji Ganesan, Co-Founder, CEO

Privacera’s SaaS-based data security and governance platform enables analytics teams to access data without compromising compliance with regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.

Red Sift

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Rahul Powar, Founder, CEO

Red Sift’s data analysis platform closes the net on the phishing problem by blocking outbound phishing attacks and analyzing the security of inbound communications for companywide email threat intelligence.

Salt Security

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Roey Eliyahu, Co-Founder, CEO

Salt Security protects APIs across the complete build, deploy and runtime life cycle. The platform discovers all APIs and the sensitive data they expose, stops API attackers, and prevents data exfiltration, account takeovers and service disruption.

Silverfort

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Hed Kovetz, CEO

Silverfort’s platform consolidates identity and access management security controls across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It enables multifactor and risk-based authentication without requiring agents, proxies or code changes.

AUGUST 2021

CRN_Aug2021_EmergingVendors.indd 8

7/29/21 5:28 PM

How To

Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

ADVERTISEMENT

Helping Customers Build Their “Now Of Work” Q. What’s changed the most for channel partners in the last year?

A. The evolution of the IT solution provider/customer relationship is one of the biggest changes. When the pandemic disrupted everyday operations, customers had more questions than answers. Many turned to their trusted partners for guidance and continuity support. The urgency has leveled off a bit, and we’ve reached the “now of work.”

As customers look for new ways to drive growth and support customer and employee engagement through communications and collaboration technologies, partners can find new opportunities to advise on how to enable the hybrid workforce while ensuring business results.

Q. What’s the impact of the cloud?

A. The now of work is built on the cloud, but no two customer environments are the same. IT partners need an offering that meets the specific, yet ever-changing, needs of each customer.

After assessing current solutions and integration, partners can direct customers down the right communications path. At Mitel, we think of this as helping a customer either get current, do more or modernize by migrating to the cloud.

Start by asking if they are utilizing the latest software releases. If communications are not optimized, additional services, such as contact center capabilities, could help them improve productivity and end customer experiences. Or it might simply be time to move from a legacy solution to a service model.

A combination of pure cloud services and subscription-based models is central to ensuring you can give customers the right solution for where they are now, as well as one that can adapt as their needs or the world around them changes.

Q. What should channel partners expect from their vendors?

A. Flexibility from vendors will help partners facilitate clear, but unique, customer journeys—from on-premises migration to hybrid solution management. That’s why we created our Velocity and Amplify programs—to help partners deliver cloud solutions that both fit their customers’ needs and support their own business models.

Mitel Velocity recognizes the deep cloud knowledge of partners who own the endto-end customer relationship including those who have completed the advanced certifications around our MiCloud Connect Partner Managed model. Meanwhile, our Amplify program is specially designed for the Agent Advisor community. Both programs offer specialized sales and technical training, dedicated account management, in-depth support throughout the deal process and competitive commissions, incentives and promotions.

Dave Silke

”

Chief Marketing Officer

Mitel’s commitment to a partner-first approach is at the heart of how we approach the market, which is why we created our Velocity and Amplify programs to ensure partners can not only deliver cloud solutions that fit their customers’ needs but their own business models.

”

Ultimately, wefind believe partners deserve a similarprogram degree ofatchoice and Partners can out more about the Velocity flexibility as their customers. www.mitel.com/velocity and Amplify at www.mitel.com/amplify.

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7/26/21 11:26 AM

2021

Emerging Vendors

Security continued Snyk

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Peter McKay, CEO

Snyk’s cloud-native platform enables developers to build secure applications. Snyk secures critical application development components, helping companies safely scale digital transformation initiatives.

Tala Security

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Aanand Krishnan, Founder, CEO

Tala delivers automated data protection and data privacy to web applications and websites. Its delivery model includes simplified integration and has zero impact on website performance or user experience.

Todyl

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: John Nellen, CEO

Todyl integrates networking and security into a single cloud platform for MSPs and MSSPs. It aggregates next-generation firewall, SSL inspection, web proxy, Wi-Fi security, privacy, SIEM and more into a unified platform.

Wiz

Founded: 2020 Top Executive: Assaf Rappaport, Co-Founder, CEO

The Wiz system analyzes vulnerabilities across the full cloud stack. It combines that information into a single graph to correlate and identify attack vectors, enabling customers to build safer cloud environments.

Storage

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Changming Liu, Co-Founder, CEO

Stellar Cyber’s security operations platform provides highspeed, high-fidelity threat detection and response across the entire attack surface. The Open-XDR platform is an easy-to-use investigation and automated response system.

Third Wall

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Scott Springer, Founder, CEO

Third Wall’s software plug-in for ConnectWise Automate gives MSPs greater control in locking down customers’ cybersecurity settings, dramatically reducing their risk profile.

TrueFort

Founded: 2015 Top Executive: Sameer Malhotra, CEO

TrueFort Fortress provides protection for modern application workloads across multi-clouds, hybrid clouds and data centers. Fortress automates application self-protection, preventing application compromise.

Strata Identity

Founded: 2019 Top Executive: Eric Olden, CEO

Strata’s offering automates multi-cloud and hybrid cloud identity management. Companies don’t need to replace systems or rewrite applications to make them compatible with new identity systems.

ThreatLocker

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Danny Jenkins, CEO

ThreatLocker develops zero trust security technology, including application whitelisting and ringfencing tools, that gives organizations control over what software can run on a network—and by whom—and what data can be accessed.

Verkada

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Filip Kaliszan, Co-Founder, CEO

Verkada modernizes physical security with a software-first approach. Command, Verkada’s centralized cloud-based platform, manages video security, access control and environmental sensors.

Xage Security

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Duncan Greatwood, CEO

Xage Fabric secures the digitization of enterprises across OT, IT and cloud. It powers the Xage Identity and Access Management, Zero Trust Remote Access and Dynamic Data Security offerings.

As data becomes more dispersed across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments, demand is growing for the next-generation data management and protection tools offered by these emerging vendors.

Calamu

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Paul Lewis, Founder, CEO

Calamu’s data protection platform creates a safe data harbor, an online location where any type of data is resilient to data breaches or ransomware attacks and is automatically compliant with data privacy regulations.

HYCU

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: Simon Taylor, Founder, CEO

HYCU provides multi-cloud data management, backup and recovery as a service, including data protection, migration and disaster recovery. HYCU said its offerings for enterprise and public cloud systems eliminate complexity and risk.

38

Stellar Cyber

Cloud Daddy

Founded: 2017 Top Executive: Joe Merces, Director

Cloud Daddy provides a holistic data protection offering, including secure backup and disaster recovery, for AWS customers. Native features include AI alerting and antimalware/ransomware intelligent threat detection.

Hammerspace

Founded: 2018 Top Executive: David Flynn, Co-Founder, CEO

Hammerspace’s “storageless data” technology simplifies hybrid cloud and multisite NAS by creating a global file system across on-premises and cloud systems to orchestrate and serve data wherever it is needed, on demand.

Model9

Founded: 2016 Top Executive: Gil Peleg, Founder, CEO

Model9 modernizes mainframe data management and business intelligence. Its patented technology securely delivers mainframe data to any cloud or on-premises storage platform, eliminating physical and virtual tape.

AUGUST 2021

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7/29/21 5:29 PM

How To

Succeed

by Seeing the Whole Story

ADVERTISEMENT

Partnering Together To Solve Our Customers’ Toughest Security Challenges Q. Why did you decide to join SentinelOne?

A. I wanted to be part of a security company that had rock-solid technology, solved real customer problems and had a special culture that represented my passions and beliefs, including having an unwavering commitment to the channel. SentinelOne checked all those boxes. On top of that, given the competitive nature of our business and knowing that partners choose who to work with and invest in, I needed to be sure that we had a compelling value proposition, so partners could make money and differentiate themselves against their competitors. Again, SentinelOne rose to the top.

Q. How has your experience leading a solution provider shaped how you design SentinelOne’s go-to-market?

A. Working at a partner has given me a clear understanding of the value partners

provide. Partners are the trusted third-party when vendors aren’t in the room, and bring relevance, reach and scale to any vendor looking to build a successful and sustainable company. This is why SentinelOne is 100 percent channel. My guiding principles to the sales organization are: Understand the partner value proposition, plan together, win or lose together and always have open and honest communication. This leads to trust between our teams and builds loyalty with each other.

Q. With SentinelOne’s recent IPO, what should solution providers expect?

A. From a channel perspective, you will see increased investments in enablement,

joint marketing, sales incentives and tools. We’ve recently announced a new series of outcome-based learning paths for sales reps and solution engineers, available at no cost on our partner portal. For our focus partners around the globe, we’re also adding higher levels of co-funded marketing activities, along with incentives geared towards motivating partners at every step of the sales cycle. Finally, we’re investing in tools to help drive operational excellence and improve our ease of doing business.

”

Mark Parinello SVP Global Sales

Opportunities like this don’t come around that often; times where opportunity, customer demand and partnership all line up. But you have to act fast, and not let the opportunity pass you by.

”

Q. Any closing thoughts?

A. SentinelOne is going to keep doing what it’s doing, IPO or not. We will continue being partner-minded with a laser focus on customer success, without having a confused go-to-market between direct and indirect. This is how we build loyalty with our trusted partners, which we believe is the best way to grow a sustainable and profitable business together. The only difference now is that we’re just going to move faster.

Defeating Every Attack. Every Second. Everyday. www.sentinelone.com/partners

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7/28/21 11:45 AM

C R N FA S T G R O W T H 1 5 0

Now That’s Quick Thinking

By Rick Whiting

W

ith the global pandemic and resulting economic upheaval as well as the massive changes in how everyone works, the past 18 months have been very turbulent waters for the IT industry and the channel. The pandemic did create big opportunities for solution providers as someone, after all, had to deliver the technology, services and support for all those remote workers. But it also brought big challenges, and business growth was by no means assured. That’s all the more reason to recognize those solution providers that have not just survived but thrived.

CRN does just that with its Fast Growth 150 list, which ranks solution providers, with annual sales of at least $1 million, by their average two-year revenue growth rate. The 25 solution providers with the highest growth rates appear on the following page.

Clutch Solutions, a Gilbert, Ariz.-based solution provider, is No. 1 on this year’s list with an impressive 744 percent two-year growth rate. The company’s core solutions and professional services are focused on IT modernization and performance enhancement with expertise in cybersecurity, networking, analytics, collaboration and mobility—key expertise that helped the solution provider succeed.

Overall, this year’s Fast Growth 150 recorded an average two-year growth rate of 83 percent. That’s slower than the 101 percent growth rate for the Fast Growth 150 list in 2020 and the 147 percent growth rate for the 2019 class. The average two-year growth rate for the 2018 Fast Growth 150 was also 83 percent.

The 150 companies on this year’s list collectively generated revenue of $94.78 billion, considerably above the $37.80 billion generated by last year’s Fast Growth 150 and $55.93 billion by the 2019 class. The cumulative revenue figure can vary widely year to year depending on the mix of small and large companies on the list.

Some of the solution providers on the 2021 Fast Growth 150 are well-established, including Ntiva (No. 12), Denali Advanced Integration (No. 17), Slalom Consulting (No. 53), Sycomp (No. 65) and Carahsoft Technology (No. 72).

This year’s Fast Growth 150 also includes 36 companies

40

that have never been on the list before. Among those newly making the list are Network to Code (No. 5), nClouds (No. 10) and the clearly forward-looking 22nd Century Technologies (No. 47).

Seattle-based 2nd Watch (No. 83 on this year’s list with nearly 48 percent two-year average growth) has appeared on the Fast Growth 150 for several years running thanks to its focus on public cloud services and, more recently, professional services.

“We’ve always been out there in terms of being a pure-play cloud, public cloud solution provider that’s really focused on delivering a world-class experience to our clients across a multi-cloud context, whether it’s AWS, Azure or Google, but also across a breadth and depth of services,” 2nd Watch CEO Doug Schneider said in a recent interview with CRN. “What’s resonating for clients too with professional services is they’re looking for a provider that they can partner with because you invest a lot of time and energy in each other,” Schneider said, noting that the company’s professional services are currently growing in the mid to high 40 percent range.

Solution providers grow both organically and through acquisitions. The latter has certainly been the case for AHEAD, the Chicago-based solution provider that was No. 15 on last year’s list after several mergers and acquisitions in 2019.

This year the IT sales and services powerhouse is No. 3 on the Fast Growth 150 with a two-year average growth rate of 535 percent—certainly fueled by its late 2020 acquisitions of RoundTower and Kovarus. The acquisitions also boosted AHEAD to No. 28 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 this year from No. 36 in 2020.

San Diego-based services provider Evotek (No. 27 with 108 percent two-year growth) has both organic growth and an acquisition to thank for its showing on this year’s list. In November the solution provider acquired Mystic River Consulting in a move to extend its expertise and service offerings in intelligent automation, business process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. ■ For information on purchasing the complete list with all collected firmographic data, please contact sales@thechannelcompany.com or call 508-416-1175. Scan here to see the full list.

AUGUST 2021

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7/29/21 5:23 PM

2021 Fast Growth 150: THE TOP 25 Rank

Company

Top Executive

1

Clutch Solutions

Garrette Backie, President

744.11%

2

Valeo Networks

Travis Mack, CEO

560.71%

3

AHEAD

Daniel Adamany, Founder, CEO

535.21%

4

Omada Technologies Portsmouth, N.H.

Richard Stover, Co-Founder; Director, Finance, Operations

372.42%

5

Network to Code

John Marchese, CEO

319.30%

6

Managing Information Systems 3

Neil Mistry, Founder, CEO

300.00%

7

Nordicom Technologies

Miles Olson, CEO

263.68%

8

BayInfotech

Maulik Shyani, CEO

247.97%

9

ImageNet Consulting

Juan Fernandez, VP, Managed IT Services

241.77%

10 nClouds San Francisco

JT Giri, Co-Founder, CEO

235.27%

Technology Group 11 DVBE Sacramento, Calif.

Richard McKinnon, CEO

226.34%

12 Ntiva McLean, Va.

Steven Freidkin, CEO

189.44%

Associates 13 CPP Whitehouse Station, N.J.

Patrick O’Dell, Managing Partner

187.15%

Technology Solutions 14 Converge Toronto, Ontario

Shaun Maine, CEO

182.38%

US 15 Computacenter Westwood, Mass.

Kevin Shank, President, Computacenter North America

166.11%

Technology Group 16 Elevate Portland, Ore.

Geoff Turner, CEO

153.93%

Advanced Integration 17 Denali Redmond, Wash.

Majdi Daher, Founder, CEO

141.38%

18 Mission El Segundo, Calif.

Simon Anderson, Founder, Chairman, CEO

141.24%

19 CloudHesive Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

James Walker, CEO, Managing Partner

140.48%

Technology Partners 20 Intuitive Edison, N.J.

Jay Modh, Founder, CEO

138.10%

Innovations 21 Infused Kingstown, R.I.

Jeff Wilhelm, Founder, CEO

123.15%

22 Mvation Fremont, Calif.

Guy Gupta, President, CEO

111.76%

North America 23 SoftwareONE Waukesha, Wis.

Ashley Gaare, President, North America

111.36%

Point Global 24 Single Ashburn, Va.

Gregory Browning, President, CEO

110.97%

Rock Cybersecurity 25 White Dallas

James Range, President

109.59%

Gilbert, Ariz.

Rockledge, Fla. Chicago

New York

Toronto, Ontario Novi, Mich.

Dublin, Calif.

Oklahoma City, Okla.

Two-Year Growth Rate

AUGUST 2021

CRN_Aug21_FastGrowth.indd 2

41

7/29/21 5:24 PM

ON TH E R ECOR D

Your Strategic Service Provider Brand Versus Cloud Suppliers

W

By Robert Faletra HILE TECHNOLOGY providers

battle it out to gain share in cloud infrastructure sales, strategic service providers need to assess where the market is headed and how they can grow and retain customers.

While Amazon Web Services holds the lead in public cloud infrastructure, Microsoft is nearly as dominant. The third slot is less settled.

Google Cloud holds the position now and, while it’s hard to imagine it will lose the position, it’s not a lock. IBM Cloud is a serious threat over the long term if the newly energized company under Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna can step up the company’s program and relationships with its strategic service provider channel.

Google Cloud is well positioned in the enterprise, and IBM’s no slouch there either—and IBM may have a better story in the midmarket and lower end of the enterprise.

Oracle is a sleeper as well. But it has a very strong direct sales force and a weak channel, where it has never put enough emphasis.

For strategic service providers, picking the right technology providers to partner with is important. The good news is once you have done that, those brands fade into the background with the customer and your brand becomes the dominant one.

But it’s also important to think about how you advance your brand relationship and the solution set you build for customers that both meets their needs and keeps you in the game over the long term.

Let’s face it: Selling Infrastructure as a Service is important, but it’s not terribly sticky. Basic Software as a Service isn’t all that sticky either. But Platform as a Service, or PaaS, is a far more complete and complex offering that pushes your relationship with the customer to a far more strategic place.

When you are providing hardware, software and infrastructure for running and managing multiple applications in

42

the cloud, you are a complete technology provider to your customer. No matter what problem or opportunity arises, it’s your brand and service that gets the call.

One of the advantages of this sales model is that it can grow from a small offering to a much larger one. As endof-life events occur with on-premises solutions, it’s easy to move those solutions to PaaS and grow your business with the customer.

There are other avenues to growth with your PaaS deployments. Depending on the customer, there may be compliance issues that need to be steadily upgraded. In the health-care field, for instance, compliance issues are always a challenge because of ever-changing government regulations. These are far easier to handle in the cloud via PaaS and are a key selling point.

Hardware and software refresh also is an added service to the customer set. It’s also easier to handle through a single relationship with a strategic service provider than the customer having to chase dozens of vendors individually. In short, the customer has outsourced a major headache.

There are other selling points that make PaaS sticky.

One selling point is that security is easier to handle via PaaS. It’s unquestionably the best way to set, manage and maintain a viable disaster recovery plan, which in today’s world of increasing ransomware-based hacking attacks is incredibly important and top of mind among all businesses.

PaaS also makes it far easier to manage and service a remote workforce that is increasingly dispersed and mobile and that needs secure but easy access to data and applications.

Positioning your brand to deliver these services puts you squarely in the strategic service provider space, which is sticky as well as profitable. n

B A C K T A L K : Make something happen. Robert Faletra is Executive Chairman of The Channel Company. You can contact him via email at rfaletra@thechannelcompany.com.

AUGUST 2021

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7/28/2021 1:41:01 PM

THE CLOUD THAT COMES TO YOU

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©2021 HPE

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7/26/21 2:52 PM