CRN Channel Madness: NetApp's McCullough, McAfee's McCray Advance To Final

After 18 days of voting across four rounds, it all came down to strong finishes. We've gone from 32 executives down to the final two in the CRN 2018 Channel Madness Tournament of Chiefs after two semifinal matchups where the difference between victory and defeat was a miniscule margin.

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

Jeff McCullough of NetApp held a healthy lead late into the round in his matchup against Joyce Mullen of Dell EMC but had to dig deep to maintain it as Mullen attempted a comeback. She got pretty close but in the end McCullough prevailed 51 percent to 49 percent.

On the other side of the bracket, McAfee's Ken McCray found himself trailing against Veeam's Kevin Rooney as the round neared its close but roared back at the buzzer to win it 51 percent to 49 percent.

So that brings us to the final round where NetApp's McCullough will square off against McAfee's McCray for the championship title.

Representing the Infrastructure region, McCullough's road to the final started with a Round 1 victory over F5 Networks' David Helfer, followed by wins against Juniper's Brian Rosenberg and APC by Schneider Electric's Shannon Sbar before edging past Mullen in the semifinals.

From the Security region, McCray powered past RSA's Faraz Siraj, then bested SonicWall's Steve Pataky and Symantec's Keith Weatherford before beating Rooney.

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