Meet Channel Futures’ Top 20 Cloud Channel Leaders for 2022
This is our sixth Channel Leaders of the Year list highlighting some of the biggest names in the industry.
Name: Ruba Borno
Job Title: Vice president, worldwide channels and alliances at Amazon Web Services
Tenure in Role: 13 months
Previous Experience: Cisco Systems, World Economic Forum, Boston Consulting Group
Key Accomplishment: Championing ongoing AWS Marketplace and AWS Partner Network additions, including growing support for managed service providers, not just system integrators and independent software vendors.
What Makes Her a Leader: Spearheading AWS’ partner program throughout its 10th year and prospectively beyond; earning the 2022 Channel Futures Influencers Award; serving as chief of staff to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins; demonstrating willingness to take risks and empower the people around her to also innovate.
Name: Stefanie Chiras
Job Title: Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Leading Red Hat’s Platforms Business Group and Linux unit; top roles at IBM, rounding out her time with Big Blue as head of Cognitive Systems.
Key Accomplishment: Continuing to bring Red Hat into the cloud channel. Under Chiras’ guidance, Red Hat this year has introduced collaboration with Kyndryl, the managed services IBM spinoff that does a lot of work in cloud computing via partners, updated its hybrid cloud platform and more.
What Makes Her a Leader: Years of experience leading critical efforts for IBM and now, the Red Hat channel, helping to turn a historically open-source software programming brand into a wider ecosystem play.
Name: Rola Dagher
Job Title: Global Channel Chief at Dell Technologies
Tenure in Role: Two years
Previous Experience: President of Cisco Systems Canada
Key Accomplishment: Bringing channel efforts to the fore at Dell, particularly tied to cloud, to the point that indirect sales consistently accounts for more than half of the company’s orders revenue.
What Makes Her a Leader: Willingness to listen to partners, and guide and implement channel program changes accordingly.
Name: Nicole Dezen
Job Title: Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President of Global Partner Solutions at Microsoft
Tenure in Role: Six months (12 years at Microsoft overall)
Previous Experience: Head of device sales at Microsoft
Key Accomplishment: Taking on ownership of the building and sale of Microsoft’s cloud applications, services and devices alongside partners.
What Makes Her a Leader: In addition to her efforts at Microsoft, working with Chief, a private network that drives women into leadership positions.
Name: Karl Fahrbach
Job Title: Chief Partner Officer at SAP
Tenure in Role: Four years (16 overall at SAP)
Previous Experience: Various top roles within SAP’s partner program; work at Oracle and Microsoft.
Key Accomplishment: Key driver behind the Rise with SAP initiative, which continues the legacy company’s push to modernize and provide transformation-as-a-service solutions for businesses, largely via the channel.
What Makes Him a Leader: Earning multiple endorsements for integral skills including strategy, team management and business development; a reputation for empathy and creativity.
Name: Tara Fine
Job Title: Vice President, Americas Partner Organization at VMware
Tenure in Role: Four months
Previous Experience: Six years as VMware Canada channel chief, 19 years at Dell Technologies
Key Accomplishment: Setting her sights on the Americas channel chief role and attaining it.
What Makes Her a Leader: Desire to listen and thoughtfully process input and feedback; intent to simplify processes for VMware partners.
Name: Jenni Flinders
Job Title: Head of Global Partner, Channels & Ecosystems at NetApp
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Global Channel Chief at VMware
Key Accomplishment: Serving as key member of the team that crafted NetApp’s new partner program, Partner Sphere, set to debut by the end of April 2023. The program will lean heavily on channel firms with services, rather than hardware, expertise.
What Makes Her a Leader: In addition to her full-time work, Flinders serves as a board member for three organizations, and promotes diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Name: Dave Gwyn
Job Title: Worldwide Sales Chief Operating Officer at Nutanix
Tenure in Role: Three months (10 years overall at Nutanix)
Previous Experience: Head of global customer success at Nutanix
Key Accomplishment: Gamely stepping into longtime Nutanix channel chief Christian Alvarez’s shoes, adding channel efforts to his customer success initiatives.
What Makes Him a Leader: Willingness to embrace a new challenge and continue Nutanix’s shift to a subscription sales model.
Name: Jonathan Hill
Job Title: Vice President Global Revenue and Operations at Linode
Tenure in Role: Three years
Previous Experience: Head of inside sales at Energage
Key Accomplishment: Guiding Linode partners through the $900 million Akamai deal.
What Makes Him a Leader: Earning a reputation for listening, providing actionable insight and recommendations, and treating people with kindness.
Name: Kevin Ichhpurani
Job Title: Corporate vice president, head of global ecosystem and business development at Google Cloud
Tenure in Role: Six years
Previous Experience: GE Digital, Ernst & Young, SAP
Key Accomplishment: Leading the charge throughout 2022 to bring together Google Cloud’s internal and channel sales, streamlining the partner organization.
What Makes Him a Leader: Willingness to expand the scope of his ecosystem and business development role to include channel partners, including large managed service providers, system integrators and other indirect experts selling and provisioning cloud computing.
Name: Clay Magouyrk
Job Title: Executive Vice President at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Tenure in Role: Eight years
Previous Experience: Amazon
Key Accomplishment: Proving instrumental in Oracle Cloud’s product launches, including that of the channel’s most significant sovereign cloud platform to date, Alloy.
What Makes Him a Leader: Spearheading Oracle’s transition to cloud; serving as a founding team member of Oracle’s cloud engineering development center in Seattle.
Name: David Parsons
Job Title: Senior Vice President, Global Alliances & Partner Ecosystem at ServiceNow
Tenure in Role: Four years
Previous Experience: Head of system integrators and outsourcers at VMware
Key Accomplishment: Spearheading ServiceNow’s continued workflow innovations for the channel to sell around hybrid work and digital transformation, largely through the use of machine learning.
What Makes Him a Leader: Guiding the team that’s part of overall efforts to bring new platforms to the channel so ServiceNow can hit its goal of more than $16 billion in revenue by 2026.
Name: Tyler Prince
Job Title: Executive Vice President, Worldwide Alliances and Channels at Salesforce
Tenure in Role: Nine years
Previous Experience: Partner at consultancy PwC
Key Accomplishment: Serving as a driving force behind Salesforce’s frequent product launches and tweaks, particularly around Customer 360, that enable channel partners and their customers.
What Makes Him a Leader: In addition to his work at Salesforce, Prince volunteers for a variety of Chicago-area organizations. He received the first-ever Impact Maker of the Year Volunteer Award in 2021 from the American Cancer Society’s North Central Region.
Name: Jeff Seifert
Job Title: Vice President of Partnerships at DigitalOcean
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Head of various partner programs for companies including Logi Analytics, Global Rescue, Flashpoint and IBM.
Key Accomplishment: Relaunching DigitalOcean’s channel program in October after nearly a year’s worth of work to revamp the company’s appeal to partners.
What Makes Him a Leader: Demonstrating ability to revive partner-centric efforts at arguably the largest independent cloud computing provider (DigitalOcean claims a $2.7 billion market cap).
Name: Phil Soper
Job Title: North America Head of Channel Sales at HPE
Tenure in Role: Seven months
Previous Experience: HPE Canada, president of PCM Canada, key executive at CompuCom
Key Accomplishment: Continuing to turn HPE and its GreenLake portfolio into a hefty hybrid cloud computing contender within the channel.
What Makes Him a Leader: While HPE, the spinoff of 83-year-old HP, is just seven years old, Soper is proving an integral part of reshaping the company from one built on hardware and legacy technologies into a digital transformation leader.
Name: Renee Taylor
Job Title: Vice President, Global Alliances and Channels at Rackspace
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Various roles at consultancy Capgemini, ending as the lead for business development and strategic alliances related to Amazon Web Services; 18 years at Hewlett-Packard.
Key Accomplishment: Offering Rackspace channel partners guidance through a year of tumult within the company. Even as Rackspace waffled between selling parts of the company or dividing into two business units, and amid the sudden resignation of CEO Kevin Jones, Taylor remained a steady presence for partners.
What Makes Her a Leader: Taking on the role of Rackspace channel chief after Lisa McLin departed and building closer relationships with partners. Taylor has been instrumental in beefing up the cloud computing managed service provider’s work with technology solutions brokerages.
Name: Oliver Tuszik
Job Title: Senior Vice President for Global Partner Sales and General Manager Routes to Market at Cisco
Tenure in Role: Four years (nine at Cisco overall)
Previous Experience: Country leader for Cisco in Germany
Key Accomplishment: Guiding partners throughout the pandemic with insights and expertise around positioning Cisco’s tools to help customers during unprecedented events; continuing to make Cisco easier for partners to work with.
What Makes Him a Leader: Multiple honors, awards and endorsements, including as a Top Gun Channel Futures Channel Chief; serving on the board of Bitkom, Germany’s digital association, until his move to the United States.
Name: Ryan Walsh
Job Title: Chief Operating Officer and Channel Chief at Pax8
Tenure in Role: One year (10 years overall at Pax8)
Previous Experience: Product management director at McAfee; various product roles at MX Logix (acquired by McAfee in 2009)
Key Accomplishment: Co-founding Pax8, which has grown from a startup looking to simplify how the channel procures and manages cloud to a well-muscled player that now teams with the hyperscalers and other cloud providers.
What Makes Him a Leader: Strategy and sales acumen that’s helped Pax8 surpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and expand beyond North America.
Name: Kate Woolley
Job Title: General Manager, IBM Ecosystem at IBM
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Chief of staff to IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna and former partner, Bain & Co.
Key Accomplishment: Consolidated all of IBM’s partner communities under her guidance (she saw the chance after working alongside Krishna for two years) and positioned the IBM Ecosystem as a key driver of IBM’s go-to-market strategy. She also simplified IBM’s partner program while expanding educational resources for all partners.
What Makes Her a Leader: A keen sense for aligning and growing channel partner efforts while expanding IBM’s work across partner types including public cloud computing providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. Bringing outside in thinking to transform business processes.
Name: Shane Zide
Job Title: Vice president, Global Sales and Channel at Vultr
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Head of partner programs at companies including Constant, Revenue.io, DigitalOcean and Verizon.
Key Accomplishment: Bringing Vultr’s channel efforts to a wider partner audience over the past year.
What Makes Him a Leader: Knowledge of the independent cloud computing sector and ability to help partners position those offerings against those of the hyperscalers.
Name: Shane Zide
Job Title: Vice president, Global Sales and Channel at Vultr
Tenure in Role: One year
Previous Experience: Head of partner programs at companies including Constant, Revenue.io, DigitalOcean and Verizon.
Key Accomplishment: Bringing Vultr’s channel efforts to a wider partner audience over the past year.
What Makes Him a Leader: Knowledge of the independent cloud computing sector and ability to help partners position those offerings against those of the hyperscalers.
The cloud computing sector is made up of a range of players. Not all companies deliver the same cloud services and platforms, nor should they. Indeed, taking strategic pieces of various cloud providers’ portfolios tends to serve end users best — and in many cases, cloud channel leaders are vital to helping to make that happen.
This is the sixth in a series of Channel Futures Channel Leaders of the Year lists. We are unveiling them one-by-one until the end of the year. They include senior partner executives in security, networking and connectivity, EMEA, communications and collaboration, managed services and distribution.
These cloud channel leaders have earned reputations as advocating for partners, all while keeping customers and the future in mind. Some have worked in the tech industry and the channel for years, while others are newer. Either way, these leaders are guiding the trajectory of one of the world’s most disruptive technologies.
We’ve chosen these cloud channel leaders for reasons including, but not exclusive to, company market share, growth potential, strength of partner network, scope of partner program and the individual’s impact on the partner ecosystem. These leaders will be eligible for our 2023 Channel Futures Influencer of the Year Award, as well as the Channel Futures/Channel Partners Circle of Excellence Award
See the slideshow above for our list of 20 cloud channel leaders of the year for 2022. They are listed in alphabetical order.
Then, check out our other 2022 Channel Leaders lists:
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Kelly Teal or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
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