Channel Futures’ 2022 Circle of Excellence: See Who Made the Prestigious List
This year’s honorees represent more than 350 years of combined experience in the channel.
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Brian Babich is the regional vice president of sales, north for AppSmart. His 24 years of industry experience include an entrepreneurial start with his own sales agency, leading a team of national account executives, building and leading channel programs, along with leading sales support and marketing groups.
In response to the rapidly changing channel space, Babich has been focusing on the things that differentiate AppSmart and support the learning and selling processes for their advisers and their customers. In addition, AppSmart is helping advisers expand their revenue streams with expanded offerings as well as educational resources.
Looking ahead, Babich expects to see “incremental change in the next year with ongoing consolidation in the adviser community due to an influx of available funding, which includes our AppDirect Capital funding programs.”
BCM One’s chief marketing officer, Paula Como Kauth, is responsible for marketing communications, product marketing, and marketing operations across the company’s family of brands. With over 20 years of experience in organizations ranging from growth start-ups to large corporations, Como Kauth brings her proficiency in working effectively across a wide array of work cultures and processes to the company’s M&A activities, including rationalizing brands, integrating teams and programs, and managing organizational transitions. Prior to BCM One, she held marketing leadership positions at two growth managed solution providers, Transbeam and UNSi, which were both acquired by GTT. She also held corporate marketing positions at AT&T Business and Qwest Communications.
Charter Communications’ senior marketing manager, Chris Hebbard, focuses on partner marketing, channel program development, strategic planning, lead generation and field marketing. Peers describe him as being “whole-heartedly committed to his craft” and “resilient, never faltering in the face of challenges.”
As the global partner network leader for Ciena, Jay Jadeja is responsible for the company’s partner network programs, enablement, training, operations, and marketing and communications. He builds partner programs that assist Ciena’s partners in achieving revenue growth and improved engagement to take advantage of a rapidly changing market.
Jadeja has been with Ciena for nearly 17 years, starting out in global business operations and strategic account sales from their London office. Commenting on the future of the channel he said, “The channel is truly evolving and changing as our partners and the industry take advantage of new business models, emerging AI and the benefits of automation.”
An accomplished speaker, author and innovator in the ICT industry, Jay McBain is often sought out for keynotes, thought leadership and future industry guidance. His nearly 30-year career has been in various executive channel sales, marketing, strategy roles within IBM, Lenovo, Autotask, ChannelEyes, and Forrester.
Over the past year, McBain performed significant research on the communities that partners leverage to drive new strategy and make new relationships. He also researched the tech stack that supports the channel in automation and efficiency. A futurist, and long-standing member of the World Future Society, McBain is a recognized expert in the future of channels, alliances, partnering ecosystems and the study of emerging go-to-market models.
Matthew Montgomery, business operations director for the Wireless Business Group (WBG) in Verizon, leads business operations, marketing, and partner sales and support. A veteran of more than 23 years in the industry, Montgomery has held numerous leadership roles in sales, marketing and indirect channel management. While at Verizon, Montgomery has designed and launched several successful channel programs, including the Verizon Partner Program (VPP).
As vice president of global channel sales for enterprise software company Everbridge, Jasmina Muller spent the last year building, launching and running the company’s channel program. “We started from the ground up building the channel program,” she said. “Since then, we have had many partners engage more to find out how they can differentiate their portfolio with Critical Event Management (CEM) solutions to help prepare for and respond to disruptive events like cyberattacks, severe weather, the pandemic and more. We continue to grow our team, program, and recruit additional partners to provide diversity and support our partner community with the needs to support their customers. The partner community is new to this solution, and it is a clear differentiator to the partner’s business, which is a differentiator for us.”
Craig Patterson is channel chief and vice president of sales for the Americas for Aryaka Networks. He leads all strategy for sales and revenue within Aryaka’s Global Indirect Program and is responsible for the go-to-market strategies within the agent, strategic alliance and & reseller channels.
Last year Patterson created Aryaka’s new channel program Accelerate. The program’s strategy focuses on all routes to market within the channel including agents, resellers, VARs, MSP, marketplaces and technology alliances. He also changed Aryaka’s go-to-market strategy to a channel-led one. The entire company is now focused on being a channel -centric company dedicated to helping partners grow their business.
As president of integrated and partner solutions for AT&T, Sarita Rao is responsible for positioning the AT&T Business brand in the market through advertising, content creation, demand generation and events. Her team capitalizes on data-driven strategic execution through advanced analytics and marketing technologies. Given the strong growth in mobility and IoT, last year Rao led the effort to dedicate an entire team of experienced wireless leaders to support AT&T’s solution providers. This move established the strategic infrastructure to combine the mobility, IoT and solution engineering groups as a direct resource in AT&T Partner Exchange. This change minimized friction points and enables solution providers to win in the marketplace more efficiently and effectively.
Rao also established a first-of-its-kind advisory council for AT&T’s Partner Exchange channel, focused on creating ongoing dialogue with solution providers to best meet their evolving needs in a dynamic market. Within its first year, the council identified new areas of revenue growth and automation opportunities for a seamless customer experience.
If Frank Rauch looks familiar to you, it’s because earlier this year he was named a Channel Futures Channel Influencer earlier this year. Although relatively new (three years) to his role as the head of worldwide channel sales for Check Point, Rauch is a seasoned channel veteran of more than 20 years.
Since joining Check Point, Rauch has realigned the company’s partner program to focus on profitability through enhanced incentives for deal registration. He also aligned the field compensation plans and training on rules of engagement, making Check Point more predictable for partners.
Since joining Observe.AI late last year as head of channel marketing, Heather Riley has been building out the company’s channel marketing. The first-ever partner academies launched, along with regular partner communications. To build overall awareness of Observe.AI in the channel, the company is sharing partner success stories and by working with their channel team to hold educational and fun local events in various markets. Riley reports that, “We have seen tremendous growth in the first year of our channel and now with marketing support we are blazing full steam ahead into year two.”
William Rubio is chief revenue officer at CallTower, providing a visionary perspective to the companywide sales and business development of the organization. He is an innovative executive with a diverse background in both engineering and sales. Rubio brings more than 20 years of diverse experience in telecommunications, IT and cloud to CallTower, along with a pioneering approach to the UCaaS sector of the industry. He has a technical, in-depth knowledge of VoIP, cloud, channel solutions, wholesale, IT and operations that he brings to the market along with a passion for strong partnerships and quality solutions.
Jamaal Savwoir is vice president of partner experience for Intelisys. His 20 years of experience includes enterprise management, network monitoring automation and unified communications as well as the contact center technology stack. Savwoir is a SaaS veteran and his background offers a wealth of knowledge regarding the challenges businesses face and the unique ways cloud solutions can help them thrive in today’s customer experience-focused, operate-from-anywhere economy.
In 1991, Ted Schuman was working for a long-distance telecommunications carrier, Allnet Communications, when he discovered the agent model. A year later, he established PlanetOne as a business entity. This year the company is celebrating three decades of growth, success and business excellence. With Schuman at the helm as CEO, it has become one of the most influential and respected go-to-market business partners in the IT industry.
Bill Steen joined OpenText last summer as director of channel and field marketing. He leads a team of channel and partner marketing professionals who focus on working with sales to achieve review and growth markets. When OpenText acquired Zix in late 2021, his team worked to review and package the new capabilities around email encryption and cloud-to-cloud backup with the existing portfolio of Webroot endpoint and Carbonite data protection.
In the coming year, Steen expects to see “the channel expand how they operate across providing managed, resell and ‘agent’ services and solutions to their customers. They will continue to optimize their revenue mix as ‘hybrid solution providers’ and security and productivity will accelerate as revenue opportunities.”
Oliver Tuszik is the senior vice president of global partner sales for Cisco. He and his team are responsible for supporting Cisco’s global ecosystem of partners who account for approximately 90% of Cisco’s annual bookings and are a differentiator in helping deliver business outcomes for customers with their unique solutions and capabilities.
Tuszik leads a global team whose overarching goal is to support the profitability of Cisco’s partners by helping them meet current business objectives and, at the same time, transform to capture new streams of recurring revenue through software, managed services and as-a-service business models. With responsibility for developing new routes to market, partner program innovations and go-to-market campaigns, Tuszik and his leadership team help drive consistency and alignment across Cisco’s regional partner sales teams and ensure Cisco’s partners have a competitive advantage that empowers their growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction.
Scott Valentine’s goal as national senior manager at T-Mobile is “to lead the company’s channel partners by managing customer engagement throughout the sales cycle and provide them with innovative solutions.” Channel partners are allowed to broker T-Mobile’s services, enabling them to bolster their offerings and provide top-tier products to other businesses.
“I couldn’t be more proud to work for such a value-driven company that believes in diversity, equity, and inclusion for our people, customers and suppliers,” Valentine said.
Scott Valentine’s goal as national senior manager at T-Mobile is “to lead the company’s channel partners by managing customer engagement throughout the sales cycle and provide them with innovative solutions.” Channel partners are allowed to broker T-Mobile’s services, enabling them to bolster their offerings and provide top-tier products to other businesses.
“I couldn’t be more proud to work for such a value-driven company that believes in diversity, equity, and inclusion for our people, customers and suppliers,” Valentine said.
As in years past, Channel Futures’ 2022 Circle of Excellence honors ICT executives for their vision, innovation and collaboration throughout the indirect channel. This year’s inductees are all first-time honorees. But that doesn’t mean they’re rookies. Far from it — they represent more than 350 years of combined experience in the channel. Their names and faces will no doubt be familiar.
Scroll through the gallery above to meet the 2022 inductees (in alphabetical order).
We will honor them all during a special dinner at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 11-14 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. It’s not too late to register for the world’s largest independent channel event!
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