Meet Channel Futures' Top 20 Cybersecurity Leaders for 2023
We've identified leaders at SonicWall, Trend Micro, Fortinet, Sophos and more in this list of the channel's top cybersecurity leaders. See who else made it and why.
![2023 Cybersecurity Channel Leaders 2023 Cybersecurity Channel Leaders](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt76caf3d413b8277b/6578c0a563c3c3040a18d90d/Cybersecurity_Channel_Leaders_hero_image.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
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Job Title: Vice President of Global MSP and Cloud Alliances at Sophos
Length of Tenure: Nine years
Responsibilities: Worldwide strategy and sales
Previous Experience: Reflexion Networks, Synchron Networks
Key Accomplishment: Strengthening Sophos’ strategic partnerships with the channel and watching those partners accelerate their revenue to achieve attractive growth rates and EBITDA margin.
What Makes Him a Leader: Next-generation cybersecurity leader in network and endpoint services and solutions. Also serves as vice chair of CompTIA’s board of directors.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Global Channels at Arctic Wolf
Length of Tenure: More than seven years
Responsibilities: Leading Arctic Wolf’s global channel organization
Previous Experience: Dell, Code42
Key Accomplishment: Continuing growth of Arctic Wolf’s partner community and overall channel ecosystem, which totals more than 1,500 partners worldwide. Continuing to accelerate partner recruitment in all regions.
What Makes Him a Leader: Ascended to Arctic Wolf’s global channel leader, continues executing on goals to win with partners.
Job Title: Vice President of the Global Partner Ecosystems at Check Point Software Technologies
Length of Tenure: 10 months
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: TD Synnex, Avnet
Key Accomplishment: Successfully merged Tech Data and Synnex to create TD-Synnex, unifying its vision, mission and values, leveraging the strengths of both cultures to build a high-performing organization and provide best-in-class services to its ecosystem.
What Makes Him a Leader: Long history in distribution, already initiating big changes in Check Point’s channel strategy.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Channels at Netenrich
Length of Tenure: More than seven years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: Cisco, MaintenanceNet, Ingram Micro
Key Accomplishment: Focusing on a partner-centric view of the market, advocating and supporting partners, first into managed services and recurring revenue business models, then into XaaS offerings that expand partners’ ability to drive growth in recurring revenues. More recently, helping partners scale their digital and security operations capabilities to serve larger customers and take a data-first approach to innovating secure operations for their customers.
What Makes Him a Leader: Extensive history in the channel, focused on continued investment and innovation for Netenrich’s partners.
Job Title: President of Worldwide Field Operations at Sumo Logic
Length of Tenure: More than two years
Responsibilities: Leading the worldwide sales, sales engineers, partner and customer success teams
Previous Experience: McAfee Enterprise, Cisco
Key Accomplishment: Making great strides this year alongside Sumo Logic’s channel partners and MSSPs. Navigating the complexities organizations face as they continue to transform, building relationships and providing cloud security solutions in a time when finding and fixing problems faster is more critical than ever.
What Makes Her a Leader: Extensive history of driving channel sales and revenue, and an advocate for women in technology.
Job Title: Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales at Palo Alto Networks
Length of Tenure: More than six years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: K2, F5 Networks
Key Accomplishment: Consistently recognizing up-and-coming talent through diverse hiring and empowerment, transforming Palo Alto Networks’ NextWave partner program in 2023, focusing on partner profitability and predictability.
What Makes Him a Leader: Long history of global channel leadership, focused on partner enablement and ecosystem growth.
Job Title: Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales and Alliances at Exabeam
Length of Tenure: Six years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: Carbon Black, Cisco
Key Accomplishment: Moved to invest heavily in a single technology alliance partner, which added revenue and fueled a better services strategy for Exabeam’s top three North American partners. In addition, streamlined its distribution strategy, which reduced costs and got more margin down to partner sellers. Also, was invited to be an executive sponsor of Black at Exabeam, an employee resource group that champions black voices internally and externally.
What Makes Him a Leader: Extensive history in the channel, Cisco’s first security sales leader, now focused on new opportunities for Exabeam partners.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances at Okta
Length of Tenure: More than one year
Responsibilities: Worldwide strategy and sales
Previous Experience: Splunk, Kibo Commerce, Baynote
Key Accomplishment: Unveiled a new partner program that rewards partners for the value they deliver to customers, not the volume they provide. Also, increased partner contribution to the business while driving significant growth in partners delivering managed services, professional services and solutions.
What Makes Him a Leader: Overhauled Okta’s Elevate partner program, well known in the industry for leadership and experience in driving successful channel programs.
Job Title: Co-Founder and CEO of ThreatLocker
Length of Tenure: More than eight years
Responsibilities: Leading cybersecurity expert with more than two decades of experience building and securing corporate networks, including roles on red and blue teams
Previous Experience: Sirrustec, MXSweep, Kingspan
Key Accomplishment: Innovating groundbreaking technology, enabling MSPs to provide security solutions previously exclusive to large enterprises.
What Makes Him a Leader: He’s responsible for ThreatLocker’s rapid growth and an outspoken advocate of zero trust security.
Job Title: Vice President of Sales at Huntress
Length of Tenure: Five years
Responsibilities: Leading channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: OpenDNS, Apple
Key Accomplishment: Launched and led the OpenDNS MSP program from 2012 to 2018, designed and launched the Huntress Neighborhood Watch program, helping thousands of MSPs raise the bar on their internal security, and built a sales team at Huntress known for breaking all of the normal sales stereotypes.
What Makes Him a Leader: Long history of working with MSPs, now focused on increasing investment in MSPs with Huntress.
Job Title: Vice President of Worldwide Channels at SentinelOne
Length of Tenure: More than three years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: Silver Peak, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks
Key Accomplishment: Launching SentinelOne’s Partner University. The initiative is all about partner enablement and increasing the value of its role-based certification program.
What Makes Him a Leader: Extensive history of channel leadership in the Americas and globally. Building partner strategies and programs that help different partner types.
Job Title: Vice President of Channel Sales at Fortinet
Length of Tenure: One year
Responsibilities: Strategizing, promoting and driving channel sales strategy
Previous Experience: McAfee
Key Accomplishment: Expanding Fortinet’s Engage Partner Program to drive growth and profitability for partners. Helping organizations foster the expertise they need to differentiate, grow and expand. Additionally, based on feedback from ongoing dialogue with partners, Fortinet has been supporting organizations as they increasingly look to consolidate their use of point products and shift their focus to more effective strategic platforms.
What Makes Him a Leader: Long history of channel leadership, now transforming Fortinet’s channel strategy.
Job Title: Vice President of U.S. Channels at Trend Micro
Length of Tenure: Nine years
Responsibilities: Channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: IBM
Key Accomplishment: Spearheading several key initiatives, including the launch of a revamped partner program, the launch of an MSSP program and accelerated Trend Micro sales in the AWS Marketplace.
What Makes Her a Leader: Extensive history as an effective global and U.S. channel leader, and focused on empowering women in tech.
Job Title: Vice President of Worldwide Partners and Alliances at Splunk
Length of Tenure: More than one year
Responsibilities: Evolving Splunk’s channel strategy and ecosystem
Previous Experience: Microsoft, Vista.com
Key Accomplishment: Leading Splunk’s channel transformation with the evolution of Partnerverse. Having a direct hand in helping build partner opportunities that inspire innovation to help customers build resilience and solve day-to-day challenges.
What Makes Her a Leader: Long history of channel leadership, one to watch as Cisco completes its acquisition of Splunk.
Job Title: Vice President of Global Channels at Deep Instinct
Length of Tenure: Eight months
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: Zscaler, Zerto, VMware
Key Accomplishment: Successful launch of Deep Instinct Prevention for Storage (DPS), which brings Deep Instinct’s Prevention Platform to Dell and NetApp storage estates, and allows partners more opportunities with this expanded use case. DPS applies prevention-first capabilities to storage protection, wherever data is stored.
What Makes Him a Leader: More than 20 years of experience in channel sales leadership, focused on growing Deep Instinct’s channel program, supporting existing partners and forging new relationships.
Job Title: Vice President of Global Channels at SonicWall
Length of Tenure: Eight months
Responsibilities: Driving SonicWall’s channel ecosystem, enabling partners to grow and profit from the outside-in shift to cybersecurity.
Previous Experience: Cisco, JS Group
Key Accomplishment: Helping to develop SonicWall’s Secure First Partner Program. Also, serving on multiple boards and communities driving DE&I initiatives and developing the next generation of channel talent.
What Makes Her a Leader: Quickly ascended to SonicWall’s global channel leader, champion and advocate for women and diversity.
Job Title: Vice President of Global Business Development, Channels and Alliances at CrowdStrike
Length of Tenure: More than five years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: SecurityScorecard, Tanium, Sophos
Key Accomplishment: Developed an emerging and core national partner program which enriched CrowdStrike’s relationships with key partners while providing professional growth opportunities. Also, launched CrowdStrike’s cloud alliance team focused on co-sell with global hyperscalers, secured investments for CrowdStrike’s first alliance program management office focused on improving the partner experience in critical areas including partner programs, partner enablement, partner incentives and partner communications, and double and triple digit growth across leading key performance indicators across all indirect routes to market.
What Makes Him a Leader: Focused on investing more in and listening to partners, and leading the company’s newly overhauled partner program.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Worldwide Partner and Alliances Sales at Zscaler
Length of Tenure: 10 months
Responsibilities: Overseeing global Zscaler partner efforts
Previous Experience: Palo Alto Networks, Imperva, Aruba Networks
Key Accomplishment: Three core areas: partner enablement, fostering strong relationships and DE&I. By prioritizing these areas, creating a more inclusive team, empowered partners with valuable resources and incentives, and fostering collaborative relationships that drive mutual growth.
What Makes Him a Leader: More than 25 years of experience driving revenue results in the enterprise software, hardware and infrastructure markets, now focused on improving Zscaler’s channel strategy and partner program.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Partner Sales at Proofpoint
Length of Tenure: More than three years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: Bitdefender, Fortinet, Fortress Network Security
Key Accomplishment: Launched a new global partner program that empowers channel partners to drive sales, enhance customer relationships and bolster their revenue streams. Proofpoint Element was built from the ground up in collaboration with partners, stripping away the unnecessary complexities that bog down the channel. It’s built on a modern framework, removing medals and gems, and focusing on tangible benefits for partners.
What Makes Him a Leader: Extensive history in global channel leadership, also successfully led multiple startups through the M&A process.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales at Malwarebytes
Length of Tenure: More than two years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: WatchGuard Technologies, Arista Networks, SHI International
Key Accomplishment: Spearheading Malwarebytes's transition to a channel-first approach, mobilizing efforts across sales, marketing, product and procurement to ensure its ThreatDown solutions are easy to buy, deploy, use and sell. He also developed a global team to expand the business, unify the GTM and support worldwide partners, signing 40-plus new distributors.
What Makes Him a Leader: Long history of worldwide and U.S. channel leadership, building scalable partner programs and boosting channel revenue.
Job Title: Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales at Malwarebytes
Length of Tenure: More than two years
Responsibilities: Global channel sales and strategy
Previous Experience: WatchGuard Technologies, Arista Networks, SHI International
Key Accomplishment: Spearheading Malwarebytes's transition to a channel-first approach, mobilizing efforts across sales, marketing, product and procurement to ensure its ThreatDown solutions are easy to buy, deploy, use and sell. He also developed a global team to expand the business, unify the GTM and support worldwide partners, signing 40-plus new distributors.
What Makes Him a Leader: Long history of worldwide and U.S. channel leadership, building scalable partner programs and boosting channel revenue.
They range in tenure from just eight months to more than nine years. But no matter the length of time they’ve been on the job, Channel Futures’ top 20 cybersecurity channel leaders of 2023 are – and have throughout their careers – made a significant impact on the industry.
Take Louise McEvoy, for instance, who’s been with Trend Micro for nine years and in her current role as VP of U.S. channel for five. She has spearheaded the launch of a new MSSP program and has an extensive history that’s in part been focused on empowering women in tech.
Then there’s Ken McCray, who is new this year to Fortinet after a 28-plus-year career at McAfee. And another newbie, Francisco Criado, took the reins at Check Point Software Technologies this year, replacing Frank Rauch, who moved on to Cato Networks. But Criado of course is no stranger to the channel, having made a career for himself at distribution giants TD Synnex and Avnet before jumping with two feet into cybersecurity earlier this year.
Those are just three of the 20 channel leaders we feature in this Channel Futures list. We selected them based on accomplishments and leadership skills, both of which we highlight in the slideshow above.
One of the most important of the many criteria for choosing our list is the impact these channel leaders are having on partners’ businesses. Previous lists this year include leaders in unified communications/contact center, EMEA and cloud. Still to come are network/connectivity leaders, distribution leaders and more.
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