Channel Madness: HPE's Richardson, Verizon's Schijns To Battle For Championship

After 18 days of voting and over 390,000 votes cast across four rounds, we've gone from 32 executives down to the final two in the CRN 2017 Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs.

Let's take a look at how the semifinal round played out.

Terry Richardson of Hewlett Packard Enterprise was a man on a mission in his matchup against Dell EMC's John Byrne. While Byrne at one point was able to narrow the gap to 4 points, Richardson led throughout and in the end closed it out 57 percent to 43 percent.

On the other side of the bracket, Verizon's Janet Schijns was a force to be reckoned with, jumping in front right from tipoff against Microsoft's Gavriella Schuster. Schuster picked up steam in weekend voting but wasn't able to muster enough votes to challenge Schijns, who won this one 74 percent to 26 percent.

So that brings us to the final round where HPE's Richardson will square off against Verizon's Schijns for the title.

Representing the Infrastructure region, Richardson's road to the final started with a Round 1 victory over Extreme's Bob Gault, followed by wins against fellow HPE-er Scott Dunsire and F5's David Helfer before besting Byrne in the semifinals.

From the Cloud region, Verizon's Schijns came out strong against LogicMonitor's David Powell, then moved past VMware's Frank Rauch and Intermedia's Eric Martorano before beating Schuster.

Richardson vs. Schijns for the CRN Channel Madness championship kicks off today at 4:00 p.m. ET and closes Wednesday, April 5 at 10:00 a.m. ET. Visit CRN.com/madness to cast your votes and choose your chief!