CDN Top 25 Newsmakers of 2014
Splits, acquisitions, and even arrests – in 2014 we saw it all. Be it for good or bad, CDN’s list of Top 25 Newsmakers of 2014 looks at the people, groups and stories that made the biggest splash this past year. Seven fresh faces came from Lenovo, IBM, Nutanix, BlackBerry, Cisco, Huawei and even the RCMP. There may be more than a couple of surprises.
Do you agree? Do you disagree? Let us know in the comments below.
Stay tuned as we also update CDN with full profiles of all our top 25 newsmakers.
Sean Forkan
Vice-President and General Manager, Symantec Canada
Besides timing, what made the Symantec split from its Norton division remarkable was that the security vendor decided to partner with Hewlett-Packard to offer a disaster recovery-as-a-service solution to be unveiled to the channel in mid-2015. The company also introduced a new, much-needed channel program.
Read more: HP and Symantec announce Disaster Recovery beta program
Graham Palmer
Country Manager, Intel Canada
It seemed that Palmer, in 2014, was on a one man crusade for the PC refresh.
With new types of form factors coming into play, Palmer even pushed for innovation in desktops, particularly in the MiniDT market.
Read more: Intel Canada boss says country is ready for PC refresh beyond XP
Rob Lloyd
President, Development and Sales, Cisco Intercloud
Cisco embarked on an ambitious $1 billion project in 2014; to build the world’s largest global Intercloud, an open network of clouds that will feature APIs for application development and a new line of cloud services for the channel. Taking the lead on the project was Canadian Rob Lloyd.
Mark Snider
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Ingram Micro Canada
Mark Snider is off to a good start in 2015 with a promotion to senior vice president of the company, but in 2014, Ingram became the first of the three major North American distributors to ink Dell in a deal.
Anton Granic
Director, Nutanix Canada
Some of the discussions around software-defined network and storage in 2014 described Nutanix as an ankle biter to the big vendor players even though Nutanix was often talked up as a serious contender in the marketplace.
Everything changed on July 24 when Nutanix partnered with Dell.
Read more: Nutanix outlines channel strategy for Canada
John Sims
President, Global Enterprise, BlackBerry
Replacing former BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins on the top newsmaker list this year is John Sims.
Sims developed a channel partner strategy of sorts for the company, saying BlackBerry will focus on the enterprise market by exploiting its strength in security.
Read more: Four major takeaways from the BlackBerry Classic Launch event
Michael Sharun
General Manager, EMC Canada
In 2014, the world learned that for nearly a year EMC was engaged in merger discussions with HP. Sometimes the best deals you make are the ones you don’t.
Read more: EMC discussed possible merger with HP: Report
James Politeski
President, Samsung Canada
You have to give credit to James Politeski for making wearables a priority for the company in Canada. While technology vendors talked about wearables Samsung may have been the only major vendor to release them into the market on a semi-regularly.
Read more: Samsung’s Gear S wearable boasts 3G