CRN Channel Madness Round 2: Valentine In Peril?

Round 2 of the 2016 CRN Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs opened yesterday and already some executives are out to strong starts. Let's take a look at how the Solutions 16 are faring.

In the Software region, 2015 Channel Madness Champion Mike Valentine of Sophos finds himself trailing for the first time in the tournament in his match-up with Red Hat's Mark Enzweiler. Valentine is down 42 percent to Enzweiler's 58 percent.

Also in Software region, Microsoft's Phil Sorgen has jumped out in front of SAP's Rodolpho Cardenuto 68 percent to 32 percent.

The tightest race so far is shaping up in the Cloud region where Brooks McCorcle of AT&T is leading VMware's Frank Rauch 51 percent to 49 percent.

In the other cloud matchup, the storage war between Datto's Rob Rae and Carbonite's Jessica Couto, Rae is out to an early lead 63 percent to 37 percent.

In the Infrastructure region, Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Kerry Bailey came out strong and is ahead of Chris Morgan of Nutanix 79 percent to 21 percent.

HPE's other bracket competitor, Scott Dunsire, is not faring as well, trailing Bob Gault of Extreme. Gault's in front of that one 68 percent to Dunsire's 32 percent.

And in the Hardware region, Lenovo's Sammy Kinlaw is cruising in his matchup over Intel's Maurits Tichelman, leading 80 percent to 20 percent, while Sandra Glaser Cheek of Ruckus leads Dell's Frank Vitagliano 76 percent to 24 percent.

Voting in Round 2 of the CRN Channel Madness tournament will be open until noon ET on Tuesday, March 29. Visit CRN.com/madness to cast your votes and choose your chief!