CRN_August2023_Issue_1421

25 MOST INFLUENTIAL

100 TOP

2

3

strong vision and “clear focus on platform” have helped to drive major growth opportunities with customers, saidAlan Mayer, senior vice presi- dent of partners, alliances and ecosystems at the Denver-based company. “The solutions that we can provide, and the platform and the breadth of the portfolio that Palo [Alto Networks] can provide—that all culminates in better outcomes to help our shared customers be successful,” Mayer said. Looking ahead, Palo Alto Networks’ investment over the years into AI/ML capabilities is looking to pay off as well, with the arrival of generative AI creating huge interest from customers in using it to improve security, solution provider executives said. WithArora and PaloAlto Networks, “there has definitely been clarity that this is an area they’re investing in and prioritizing,” Mayer said. “Just like the other areas that they’ve focused on, they’ve demonstrated leadership capabilities [in AI].” Palo Alto Networks expects to capitalize on the technology through utilizing generative AI in forthcoming security products, including tools to prevent threats that are, ironically, assisted by apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT,Arora said. Ultimately, with a market capitalization of nearly $74 billion as of this writing, PaloAlto Networks is easily the top-valued publicly traded cybersecurity vendor and getting closer to reaching Arora’s goal of becoming the first to reach a $100 billion valuation. That doesn’t mean Arora thinks he has it all figured out, though. Far from it: Even five years in, “I still don’t know enough,” he said. And as much as ever, when he doesn’t understand something, “I’m

Jensen Huang Founder, President, CEO Nvidia Huang’s long-term bet that Nvidia’s GPUs would become the compute engines for the world’s most demanding applications is paying off as its processors now power popular applica- tions like ChatGPT. But his vision is bigger than that, which is why he has grown Nvidia into a “full-stack computing” company.

Antonio Neri President, CEO

Hewlett Packard Enterprise The technology visionary, who put partners into the cloud consumption fast lane going head to head against AWS and Microsoft Azure, is at it again. This time Neri is carving a path for partners to succeed in the fast-growing AI mar- ket with the “fourth” public cloud—HPE GreenLake for Large Language Models.

4

5

George Kurtz Co-Founder, President, CEO CrowdStrike

Chuck Robbins Chair, CEO Cisco Systems

Robbins has been at the helm of the tech giant for eight years and has navi- gated Cisco through times of enormous change. Under his leadership, Cisco is shifting from a hardware heavyweight to a software giant. As of late, he has been heads-down focused on driving the company’s Cisco Plus as-a-service strategy.

Kurtz has taken CrowdStrike from an ambi- tious vision—to provide a cloud-native software platform that offers com- prehensive security capabilities—and made it a reality, creating one of the biggest powerhouses in the cybersecurity industry in the process.

very open about not knowing it,” Arora said. He noted that his next two phone calls that day were going to be on technical aspects of security “because I have a few questions.”

Scan here to read the full interview.

10

6

7

8

9

Satya Nadella Chairman, CEO Microsoft

Michael Dell Founder, Chairman, CEO Dell Technologies Michael Dell has led the company through its best year, with $102 billion in sales. At Dell Technologies World he said Dell would take on its customers’ digi- tal challenges by meeting their compute and storage needs no matter where the workload resides. “Multi- cloud by design isn’t just a tag line,” he told the crowd.

Adam Selipsky CEO Amazon Web Services Selipsky continues to keep AWS in the No. 1 global market-share spot for cloud computing, with his company now at an $85 billion run rate. In a bold move, Selipsky has turned his focus to AI—investing millions in 2023 in new products, programs and strategic channel go-to- market collaborations.

Arvind Krishna Chairman, CEO IBM

Thomas Kurian CEO Google Cloud

With Nadella at the helm, Microsoft dominates the emerging world of gen- erative AI, with Copilot and Large Language Models having the potential to rewrite what it means to do business. It has created a new market category while continuing to innovate in cloud, security and produc- tivity applications.

Krishna has kept the 112-year-old vendor in the conversation around bleeding-edge technolo- gies—from generative AI and security to containers and the cloud. The 30-plus- year IBM veteran has also put partners at the forefront of his strategy to bring these technologies to market for enterprises worldwide.

Kurian’s strategy this year has enabled Google Cloud to grow cloud revenue at a faster clip than rivals AWS and Microsoft in the first quarter of 2023. The CEO has doubled down on generative AI this year by launching a slew of new offerings and partnerships on the enterprise and con- sumer fronts.

14

AUGUST 2023

Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker