CDN Top 25 Newsmakers of 2014, part 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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