The Top 25 Channel Sales Leaders Of 2025

As part of CRN’s Top 100 Executives Of 2025 list, we highlight 25 sales executives leading the channel charge.

As artificial intelligence and cybersecurity become top priorities for many businesses, it’s up to vendors’ channel sales leaders to ensure they arm partners with the right offerings for their joint customers and the right resources to set up solution providers for success.

For our list of the Top 25 Channel Sales Leaders of 2025, CRN has chosen executives at channel-friendly tech vendors who are enabling partners to grow and profit from a variety of opportunities, whether those are in security, computing, storage, networking, enterprise software or infrastructure, among other areas.

With vendors tackling the AI opportunity from several different angles, these channel sales leaders are enhancing programs and deploying new resources to train, certify, enable and incentivize partners on selling, integrating and supporting technologies that will help them increase their sales and grow their margins.

What follows is our list of the Top 25 Channel Sales Leaders of 2025, part of CRN’s Top 100 Executives Of 2025.

25. Tara Fine

VP, Americas Channel Organization

Broadcom

Fine has been key to the integration of VMware’s partner and commercial teams into Broadcom. She helped shape the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program with a focus on deeper investments in Broadcom’s most valued partners.

24. Michelle Welch

CMO, SVP, Business Strategy

WatchGuard Technologies

Welch has brought a strong focus on providing continuous partner enablement beyond the initial on-boarding and training at WatchGuard. The vendor is now providing several dedicated teams—including technical account managers and deployment teams—to ensure ongoing support to partners.

23. Tom Evans

Chief Partner Officer

Cloudflare

Evans has overseen Cloudflare’s accelerated push with partners over the past year around SASE and application security. The vendor ’s shift to a channel-focused sales strategy has resulted in significant growth in partner-initiated opportunities as well as in deals provided to partners.

22. Anthony Torsiello

SVP, Partners, Alliances Sales

Zscaler

Torsiello has overseen enablement initiatives such as giving partners the same resources as Zscaler’s sales force to provide the best experience for partners and customers. Efforts have included ensuring partners have access to the same tools, systems and resources as internal employees.

21. Scott Mann

Managing Director, Scale Computing International

Scale Computing

Mann has a gift for using the disruption around Broadcom’s buy of VMware to win the hearts and minds of solution providers to promote Scale’s virtualization platform. He has grown the channel team and spearheaded growth initiatives across EMEA.

20. David Zember

SVP, Worldwide Channels, Alliances

Qlik

Qlik now provides a comprehensive data integration and analytics portfolio, thanks to its acquisitions of Talend and Upsolver. Zember has meshed those operations and is providing partners with a complete data platform and strategy to meet the surging data demands of AI initiatives.

19. Stefanie Chiras

SVP, Partner Ecosystem Success

Red Hat

Chiras anchors the company’s ecosystem through new synergies from IBM's acquisitions, innovation from Red Hat and parent IBM’s R&D wings, plus customer interest in open source for AI use cases, hybrid cloud estates and Red Hat as an alternative to legacy virtualization.

18. Brian Lanigan

SVP, Global Partner Ecosystem

SentinelOne

Lanigan is driving the strategy to double down on growth opportunities with partners, including AI-powered SIEM and cloud security. A key focus on partner enablement has been on enhancing the content available to partners from the product marketing team.

17. Steven Loeb

VP, Marketing, Distributed IT

Eaton

The 17-year channel-savvy Eaton veteran—who helped lead the company to a 2024 CRN Annual Report Card victory in the power protection and management category—has delivered game-changing programs for partners. Loeb is now bringing the marketing muscle they need to be successful in the AI era.

16. Jenni Flinders

SVP, Worldwide Partner Organization

NetApp

Flinders is keeping Net App squarely in partners’ sights. She is spearheading efforts to use the channel to help businesses work with hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure because she knows there is no one right way to do cloud.

15. Kevin Ichhpurani

Corporate VP, Head Of Global Ecosystems, Business Development

Google Cloud

Ichhpurani calls Google Cloud the “undisputed leader” in AI thanks not only to its innovation engine but a channel charge in 2025 that gives partners the tools and enablement programs needed to drive AI services and solutions.

14. Chris Bell

SVP, Global Channels, Alliances, Corporate Development

Sophos

Bell, who joined Sophos through its acquisition of Secureworks, is overseeing efforts to help more partners adopt key offerings such as MDR, with an emphasis on MSPs. Key enablement initiatives include adding persona-based training featuring fast-track modules.

13. Michael Khoury

VP, Ecosystem Partners

Palo Alto Networks

Khoury is spearheading moves by Palo Alto Networks to rely on partners more for delivery of its broad cybersecurity platform, including through preparing a revamp of its channel program. A major emphasis will be around better enabling partners on the vendor’s platformization strategy.

12. Kareem Yusuf

SVP, Ecosystem, Strategic Partners, Initiatives

IBM

Although Yusuf only started in this role in January, he inherits a reinvigorated partner program with the tools to equip solution providers introducing and scaling AI with customers. He also brings a deep technological expertise that could further IBM’s reputation for product innovation.

11. Ruba Borno

VP, Worldwide Channels, Alliances

Amazon Web Services

AWS’ channel leader is forming strategic collaboration agreements and co-innovation programs with partners at a blistering pace. Borno has helped onboard hundreds of GenAI Competency partners with a focus on moving proof-of-concept AI solutions into production.

10. Rodney Clark

SVP, Partnerships, Small, Medium Business

Cisco Systems

Channel stalwart Clark swooped in as Cisco’s new channel chief in 2023 and since then has been hard at work revamping Cisco’s iconic, 30-year-old partner program. He and his team have been co-designing with partners and rolling out pieces of Cisco 360, set to launch in early 2026.

9. Nicole Dezen

Chief Partner Officer, Corporate VP, Global Partner Solutions

Microsoft

If Microsoft is the speeding locomotive of AI innovation, think of Dezen as the ballast providing foundational support for channel partners advising customers through AI adoption and expansion—not to mention bread-and-butter engagements of cloud migrations.

8. Kobi Elbaz

SVP & General Manager, Global Revenue Operations

HP Inc.

Elbaz is focused on building an ecosystem for HP that delivers results for its channel partners by rolling out massive new incentives when they sell across the entire portfolio. He has also created advanced training and master classes for partners to get a leg up on the latest technology.

7. Gordon Lord

VP, U.S. Channels, North America

Schneider Electric

Lord is driving an AI recurring revenue revolution at the power and cooling giant. He is making sure partners have the products, services and channel investments necessary to enable customers to drive next-generation AI solutions from the edge to the data center.

6. Dave Guzzi

VP, Global Partner Scale

Intel

Tasked with helping partners succeed, Guzzi is evolving Intel’s partner programs as it undergoes a larger transformation. This includes increasing funding for partner incentives and investments, moving to an outcome-based market development fund model and focusing its ISV investments on AI.

5. Craig Weinstein

VP, Americas Partner Organization

Nvidia

Weinstein is pushing partners to embrace Nvidia’s full stack of hardware and software, including its agentic AI tools. He also wants to increase the amount of professional services going through partners, which he calls “extremely helpful” to its go-to-market strategy.

4. Simon Ewington

Worldwide Channel, Partner Ecosystem Leader

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Ewington, a 30-year HPE veteran, has added massive firepower to the HPE channel charge with a Partner Ready Vantage program that combines 11 programs into one and features a Triple Platinum Plus tier aimed at getting more partners to sell the complete HPE portfolio.

3. Christian Goffi

VP, Americas Channel Sales

Nutanix

Goffi has helped elevate Nutanix’s partner program with massive incentives around wining new customers and expanding its global reach. His channel prowess helped Nutanix increase its customer base from around 24,000 just two years ago to now over 28,500 via a channel-first go-to-market strategy.

2. Denise Millard

Chief Partner Officer

Dell Technologies

After a 2024 global tour meeting with solution providers and systems integrators, Millard is leading the transformation of Dell’s partner program through AI by harnessing the technology to get partners the best pricing, collateral and leads, all inside a blazing-fast sales cycle.

1. Rob Cato

VP, North America Channels

Lenovo

Cato is on a mission to give partners more time to win customers by making Lenovo easy to work with.

“One of the things that I’m really focused on as the channel leader at Lenovo is helping our partners spend more time with their customers and less time trying to figure out how to do business with Lenovo,” he told CRN in May.

During a partner conference in New Orleans earlier this year, Cato said he had one-on-one meetings with around 80 partners and came away with clear objectives—with a big part of the ask from partners being around AI training, including enablement in the sale of AI PCs and infrastructure. Lenovo 360 has a number of those classes now, he said, but he expects to increase that number at the end of the year.

The channel framework has seen greater adoption with partners around the world, according to Cato, with 57,000 training certifications created last year, a 55 percent jump year over year.