Women’s History Month: Channel Chiefs Lead Innovative Initiatives

AWS’ Ruba Borno, Cisco’s Rhonda Henley and Microsoft’s Julie Sanford join other female leaders in the channel in highlighting innovative channel initiatives.

A Generative AI Center of Excellence for partners. Accelerating and expanding routes to market with partners. And a brand new partner program with 23 distinct AI-related benefits.

These are some of the most innovative initiatives spearheaded in 2023 by influential women at the helm of major channel partner programs.

For Women’s History Month, which runs through March 2024, CRN is showcasing some of these leaders’ victories last year shared as part of the 2024 Channel Chiefs.

Influential Female Channel Chiefs

The above initiatives came from Amazon Web Services’ Ruba Borno, Cisco Systems’ Rhonda Henley and Microsoft’s Julie Sanford.

Although women hold leadership positions with a variety of vendor channel organizations, much work remains in increasing the representation of women in business, technology and the channel.

WomenTech Network reports that women make up 28 percent of employees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields in the United States.

The proportion of female staff at some of the largest tech companies in the world includes:

45 percent at Amazon
37 percent at Facebook
34 percent at Apple
33 percent at Google
29 percent at Microsoft

And the share of leadership positions held by women at these companies ranges from 26 percent to 34 percent.

The pay gap also continespues as an obstacle to equality, with women in STEM making $15,000 less a year than men. Latina and Black women typically earn around $52,000 a year compared to the $60,828 typical of all women and $85,000 for men, according to WomenTech Network.

Resources for women interested in tech and business or looking to reach a higher level include:

Visit the 2024 Channel Chiefs page to see more answers and insights from these chiefs and others – including their strategy around channel market development funds (MDF) and channel goals for 2024.

And read on for initiatives some of the most powerful women in the channel led in 2023.

Ruba Borno

Amazon Web Services

Vice President, Worldwide Channels and Alliances

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

We're proud of the work we're doing to innovate across key technology areas like generative AI. We recently introduced a first-of-its kind for AWS and our partners, the Generative AI Center of Excellence.

This Center of Excellence is a critical bridge between the potential of AI and the growing landscape of generative AI tools, applications, and use cases that have the potential to revolutionize our customer experiences.

And we developed this together with our partners. The CoE includes content contributions from generative AI solution providers and industry thought leaders including Anthropic, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, Cohere, IBM, McKinsey, NVIDIA, and Pinecone.

This content provides AWS Partners of varying sizes, maturity, and domain expertise a path to building expertise and solutions in generative AI, making it more accessible to customers.

Rhonda Henley

Cisco Systems

Vice President, Americas Partner Organization

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

We are accelerating and expanding our routes to market with our partners to meet their customer consumption options and desired outcomes.

We are doing this with purpose-built partner managed services based around the Cisco portfolio and paying uplifts to our sales team to help drive more partner managed services.

This is a huge differentiator in the market, specifically how we are paying uplifts to our sellers when it is a Cisco deal sold with a partner managed service.

We still have more work to do in this area, but we have been getting great feedback from our partners on this initiative.

Julie Sanford

Microsoft

Vice President GTM, Programs & Operations

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

The design, development, and the launch of the new Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program, launched during our Tier I partner event on July 15, 2023.

The program launched with 23 distinct AI-related benefits that were infused across the partner lifecycle, from new certifications, technical and product benefits, skilling and enablement, go-to-market, and co-sell.

We launched a new $100 million investment in AI, which incents partners for pre-sales activities, deployment, and marketplace ready AI applications.

In four months since launch, we have trained over 50,000 pre-sales and depth technical learners via AI bootcamps and cloud weeks; over 22,000 downloads of our hero AI Transformation Partner Playbook; 18% increase in partners earning their Data & AI certifications; and hundreds of engagements for the new AI incentive offering.

Kirsten Esposito

KnowBe4

VP, Global Channel Sales

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

The most innovative initiative my team led this year was the full discovery, analysis and refinement of our channel strategy and partner GTM programs.

My team and I orchestrated a full discovery cycle of all available partner business data, working to uncover exactly what our most successful partners have in common.

We worked to build consensus across the organization on what it will take for us to achieve our growth goals with our partners, and allocate investments that align with this.

Our bold approach will help refine how we engage with partners across the lifecycle. It's been a thrilling year and I couldn't be prouder of my team's vision and dedication. 2024 is going to be big!

Denise Millard

Dell Technologies

Chief Partner Officer

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

Undoubtedly, the most innovative initiative our team was responsible for was the successful launch and ongoing impact of our Partner First for Storage Strategy.

Although our strategy to drive storage through partners isn't new, we put in place an incentive to sellers to sell storage through our partners.

This strategy helps provide predictability of engagement for those partners.-In the storage selling cycle, there's great value in partners' domain expertise.

They help us drive even larger transformational deals with the datacenter. Now, more than 99% of customers and potential customers are considered partner first for storage.

Maria Martinez

Barracuda Networks

VP of Channels, North America

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

In 2023 Barracuda refreshed and relaunched our partner program to help reduce complexity for partners and support them more proactively.

The program rewards partners for all the business they do with Barracuda, recognizing all the routes to market in a single program. My team has been focused on the execution of this innovative initiative.

We work closely together with our channel partners for the success of our mutual customers.

This involves sharing resources and expertise to deliver a seamless customer experience and drive shared success.

We are there to provide support, tools, training - and more - to help partners at every stage of a new customer's journey, from onboarding and training a new customer, to expanding the customer's use of the technology and maximizing the value they receive from it.

Ghazal Asif

Rubrik

VP, Global Channel and Alliances

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

In 2023, the most innovative initiative that our team spearheaded was the introduction of the Rubrik Transform Partner Program.

This groundbreaking program revolutionized how we engage with our partner community by implementing a points-based scoring system.

This scoring system was carefully designed to acknowledge and reward partners for their contributions in promoting Rubrik's Data Security solution set. Partners who actively participated in a set of value-added activities aimed at boosting Rubrik's offerings received points based on their achievements.

The impact of this innovative program on our partner community was substantial. It provided a structured and transparent pathway for all our partners, regardless of their specific go-to market, to enhance their status within the Rubrik ecosystem.

As partners accrued points, they gained access to a range of strategic financial benefits and opportunities for accelerated growth in their partnership with Rubrik.

Kate Woolley

IBM

General Manager, IBM Ecosystem

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

In June of 2023 we announced our enterprise data and AI platform, watsonx.

Our watsonx offerings (watsonx.ai, watsonx.data and watsonx.governance) give our ecosystem partners a competitive edge with clients who are demanding AI-powered solutions. Our watsonx solutions are open, governed, responsible and designed to accelerate impact.

My team and I were integral in making watsonx accessible to IBM partners and empowering their success through a few different ways.

We made free training available to partners, which also includes sales resources and demos.
We created a challenge which saw over 5,000 global system integrator partner staff learn about the platform, use our solution, and get enablement materials that they can use with clients
We also prioritized creating ways for them to easily use our foundation models. With our generative AI models and watsonx, IBM enables businesses to be AI value creators.

Businesses can bring their proprietary data to IBM base models and build a model that is unique to their business and use cases. In addition to our own models, IBM provides flexibility to use third-party models like Meta's Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model and models from the Hugging Face community.

Stefanie Chiras

Red Hat

Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

Over the past year, Red Hat has been working on revitalizing the framework of our global partner program to provide an improved partner experience that aligns more with changing business needs and customer demand, building on Red Hat's hybrid cloud strategy.

The updated program takes a more modular approach, offering a simplified and flexible path for partners to engage in different capacities with Red Hat regardless of partner type.

This enables partners to be recognized for the diverse ways they engage with Red Hat and support customers at each stage of their cloud journey.

As part of this initiative, Red Hat is continuing to update our model for bookings and customer lifecycle.

Partners play an essential role in nurturing customers after procurement because they have that customer trust, so it's crucial that we enable and position our partners front and center at every step of the customer journey.

Nisha Holt

Check Point Software Technologies

Head of Americas Channel

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

I introduced an initiative and program to drive greater relevance within our partner community which is based on engagement at all levels and roles.

This has fundamentally changed the way that Check Point works and interacts with our partner community and has resulted in higher satisfaction scores from our partners.

Sarita Rao

AT&T

President, Integrated & Partner Solutions

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

This year we are working hard to simplify our overall business to make it easier for channel partners to choose AT&T.

We've launched modules supported solely by Solution Providers to grow acquisition in our Mid-Market accounts, giving our Solution Provider partners more opportunities for new customer acquisition.

Elisa Lai

JFrog

Channel Partner Program Leader

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

We launched JFrog's new channel partner program, which was designed specifically to make technology accessible for customers, and simplifying the way partners think about go-to-market motions, with these differentiations:

No Upfront Costs
We Work Alongside You
Sales and Tech Support Included
Say Goodbye to MDF Management
No More "Sell It and Forget It"
Making Co-sell Easy

Karen Chiang

Rhombus

Director of Channels

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

We ran a campaign in an attempt to drive net-new logo acquisition through our partners.

We raffled off big ticket items based on the size of the closed won opportunities. Each individual who closed an opportunity of a certain size got entered into the raffle for that level of reward.

We targeted rewards that resonated with the physical security market, and we split the prizes among two quarters: smaller prizes in the first quarter, and larger items in the second quarter to drive continued interest.

While raffles can be an unpopular motivator, the structure made all the difference. Once we gave away the smaller prizes, this created much more momentum in the channel, generating record numbers of deal registrations and competition even among the sellers within a partner.

Our channel marketing manager helped drive interest by recording the whole process of picking the raffle winners to the announcement and informing the winners. It was an incredible adventure for both Rhombus and our channel partners alike. We had a ton of fun doing it and we drove a lot of business from it!

Hillary Taylor-Hartle

WatchGuard Technologies

Manager, Partner Development

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

Platform integration is our top initiative. WatchGuard offers an integrated platform that provides breadth and allows partners to achieve improved operational and security efficacy.

This year, WatchGuard delivered the following platform enhancements:

WatchGuard MDR: WatchGuard's new MDR service provides advanced threat detection and response capabilities on top of WatchGuard EDR, EPDR, and Advanced EPDR.
ThreatSync: WatchGuard's comprehensive and simple-to-use XDR solution equips organizations with XDR capabilities to accelerate cross-product detections and orchestrate faster responses to threats from a single pane of glass.
CyGlass acquisition: WatchGuard acquired CyGlass Technology Services to integrate and deliver new AI- and ML-based detection and response and Open XDR capabilities.
AuthPoint Total Identity Security: A comprehensive bundle that combines AuthPoint multi-factor authentication (MFA) with dark web credential monitoring capabilities and a corporate password manager.
New Line of Firebox Appliances: Tabletop firewalls that deliver more memory and faster processing speeds to help MSPs secure distributed business environments for increased network security protection.

As WatchGuard continues to expand its security services, a top priority is to deliver new services in a fully integrated solution, allowing partners to experience the operational benefits of centralized administration and reporting, and the security efficacy benefits of shared knowledge and correlated threat data.

Lorna Rivero

Mimecast

VP, Global Partner Marketing

Name the single most innovative initiative for which you and/or your team were responsible in 2023 and describe its impact on your partner community.

The launch of our new program, Mimecast Partner ONE.

Our revamped partner strategy will offer new benefits and enable our partners to scale and grow while we work together to protect thousands of organizations around the globe!