CRN breaks down the 25 Most Influential Executives of 2024 who are driving sales, transforming their business and paving the way for the future.

The impact of today’s most influential tech executives is extending beyond the IT world and into every industry.

From Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang pushing to make AI accessible to every business in 2024, to Cisco Systems’ Chuck Robbins and Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell driving innovation on the infrastructure, PC and networking fronts, these 25 CEOs are reshaping how companies operate and function on a daily basis.

The influence these 25 tech leaders and CEOs bring to the table is shaping the world around us with new artificial intelligence, next-level cybersecurity and cloud computing capabilities once thought to be decades away. However, thanks to these passionate leaders, technology is seeping into every corner of every market as many see IT as their key differentiator versus the competition.

This year’s Most Influential executive was none other than Nadella, who is turning his $62 billion software giant into an AI force to be reckoned with.

Other leaders who are shaping the world of IT include Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora, IBM’s Arvind Krishna and HPE’s Antonio Neri, to name a few.

CRN breaks down the 25 Most Influential Executives of 2024 who are driving sales, transforming their business and paving the way for the future, part of CRN’s Top 100 Executives of 2024.

25. Sean Kerins

President, CEO

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics is one of the old dogs of IT and electronics distribution, founded in 1935, but Kerins has shown it can indeed learn new tricks. The company this year exited its Seneca Data-branded PC and digital signage business as a way to simplify its business model and focus on its channel partners.

24. Hock Tan

President, CEO

Broadcom

Tan has defied conventional wisdom, completely overhauling VMware’s product, subscription and go-to-market model. In his first-100-day blog post, Tan called it building “the world’s leading infrastructure technology company” in a makeover designed to provide “greater profitability and improved market opportunities for our partners.”

23. Patrick Zammit

COO, Incoming CEO

TD Synnex

Zammit stepped into the COO role late last year and is now slated to take over as CEO of TD Synnex on Sept 1. Zammit, who spent a couple of decades in the European distribution market, told CRN he already has plans to offer more specific SMB programs and invest heavily in bringing AI to the channel.

22. Dev Ittycheria

President, CEO

MongoDB

Ittycheria has transformed MongoDB into a cloud database powerhouse modernizing applications with a robust ecosystem of partners. Now he has his sights set on making sure that MongoDB is the preferred platform for building a new era of AI applications, and he’s leveraging his high channel IQ to do it.

21. Ken Xie

Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Fortinet

Fortinet’s expansion into security operations and secure access service edge under Xie’s leadership has paid off, with the company reporting strong growth in demand in the categories. The vendor also recently infused its flagship FortiOS platform with a massive array of new capabilities including generative AI and data protection.

20. Pat Gelsinger

CEO

Intel

Three years into his tenure as Intel’s CEO, Gelsinger has left an outsized mark on the semiconductor giant by accelerating its advanced chip manufacturing capabilities, championing an “AI everywhere” strategy that touches everything from the edge to the cloud and building out a game-changing software and services business.

19. George Kurian

President, CEO

NetApp

No company has done more to show the storage industry how to connect to the cloud than NetApp has under Kurian. Indeed, the top three hyperscalers all work with NetApp’s storage technology as a way to tie on-premises and cloud storage into hybrid infrastructure that meet customer requirements for storage flexibility.

18. Paul Bay

CEO

Ingram Micro

Bay, who has spent nearly three decades at Ingram Micro, certainly knows IT distribution. He took the reins as CEO in 2022 and has since been focused on building intelligent business solutions using AI and other cutting-edge technology, all while overseeing strong growth.

17. Matt Garman

CEO

Amazon Web Services

Garman has hit the ground running as AWS’ new CEO. The 18-year AWS veteran plans to leverage his product innovation and customer-focused skills to take the $100 billion cloud giant to the next level with a massive focus on AI and generative AI.

16. Enrique Lores

President, CEO

HP Inc.

Lores set HP Inc. on a path to become a hybrid work powerhouse with its acquisitions of Poly and other companies. Now the CEO is betting on AI to make the company’s products even more indispensable, touching everything from PCs and peripherals to software and services.

15. Lisa Su

Chair, CEO

AMD

Having re-established AMD as a power player in the CPU market for PCs and servers, Su is making significant investments with the aim of AMD becoming the leader in AI computing, with chips that power everything from PCs and edge devices to data centers and cloud infrastructure.

14. Thomas Kurian

CEO

Google Cloud

Under Kurian’s leadership, Google Cloud became a profitable company for the first time in 2023 and never looked back. The cloud giant is now on a $38 billion run rate as Kurian spearheads all of Google’s efforts to become an AI leader in hardware, software and services.

13. Rami Rahim

CEO

Juniper Networks

Rahim’s technology foresight, including the acquisition of AI networking pioneer Mist Systems five years ago, is poised to power an AI networking revolution. Rahim—who will oversee the combined HPE-Juniper Networking business when the blockbuster deal closes—is disrupting the networking status quo with AI innovation.

12. Sanjay Poonen

President, CEO

Cohesity

Poonen has built data protection technology developer Cohesity into a rare tech unicorn that is profitable while also enjoying strong growth. Cohesity in February unveiled its plan to acquire Veritas’ data protection business in a bid to become a leader in AI-powered data security and management.

11. Tomer Weingarten

Co-Founder, CEO

SentinelOne

Under Weingarten’s leadership, SentinelOne has continued its aggressive expansion into areas beyond its core endpoint security offerings such as cloud security, which saw the company recently acquire application protection specialist PingSafe. Weingarten has also led SentinelOne to double down on the development of AI-powered capabilities for security operations.

10. Yuanqing Yang

Chairman, CEO

Lenovo

As Lenovo continues to dominate the PC market, Yang has been making significant strides in growing the company’s solutions and data center infrastructure businesses while making a powerful entrance into the AI PC space as part of his all-encompassing hybrid AI strategy that is meant to benefit everyone.

9. Arvind Krishna

Chairman, CEO

IBM

Krishna’s leadership of the 113-year-old technology giant has led to more products and services challenging notions of what AI can do while staying on top of the next paradigm shift in computing‑-quantum.

8. Nikesh Arora

Chairman, CEO

Palo Alto Networks

Arora has driven Palo Alto Networks’ expansion into becoming a provider of a comprehensive cybersecurity platform spanning network, cloud, application and security operations. Recent moves under Arora’s leadership have included the planned $500 million acquisition of IBM’s QRadar SaaS business and the launch of a broad array of AI-powered security capabilities.

7. Bill McDermott

President, CEO

ServiceNow

Not only has McDermott made ServiceNow a leader in the digital workflow business, he has led the charge to be on the forefront of applying AI to how his company runs and how its technology improves operations for customers while turning it into a real darling of Wall Street.

6. George Kurtz

Co-Founder, CEO

CrowdStrike

Kurtz has overseen massive growth by driving its cloud-native platform strategy and spearheading the expansion of the Falcon platform. After the widespread IT outage caused by a faulty CrowdStrike update, Kurtz has pledged to improve testing while also providing customers with more control over update deployments.

5. Michael Dell

Founder, Chairman, CEO

Dell Technologies

Forty years after founding Dell, Michael Dell has Dell Technologies firing on all cylinders to power the AI revolution. The company’s compute and storage portfolio has never been stronger, and he has upped the company’s channel game considerably with the global Partner First For Storage strategy.

4. Chuck Robbins

Chair, CEO

Cisco Systems

Robbins’ biggest and boldest bet—the $28 billion acquisition of Splunk—has the potential to forever change the network security equation with unprecedented AI insight and recommendations. Robbins has Cisco moving at lightning speed so partners can capitalize on what he calls Cisco’s “unique ability” to bring together networking, security, observability and data.

3. Antonio Neri

President, CEO

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Neri’s technology vision and unwavering channel commitment have put HPE partners in a prime position to capture the blockbuster GenAI opportunity. The Nvidia AI Computing By HPE collaboration, including HPE Private Cloud AI, are channel game-changers.

2. Jensen Huang

Founder, President, CEO

Nvidia

Thanks to early bets he made on the promise of accelerated computing over the past three decades, Huang has grown Nvidia from a designer of GPUs for gaming PCs to a “full-stack computing” platform that holds tremendous influence over how data centers and software applications are designed for AI.

1. Satya Nadella

Chairman, CEO

Microsoft

Satya Nadella leads one of the most important companies in the AI gold rush, making tremendous strides in enabling the channel to sell AI solutions as well as a technology portfolio that includes the Copilot line of chatbot virtual assistants that are helping to bring GenAI to the masses.

The top man at the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant has taken further steps to democratize the AI revolution with offerings such as Copilot Studio and Azure AI Studio allowing developers to make their own copilots under enterprise-grade safety, security and responsibility.

Microsoft is also taking IT into a new world of hardware with Copilot+ PCs and a deep collaboration with chipmaker Nvidia, not to mention continued innovation in its core cloud, productivity and developer products.

Nadella has made a priority of investing in his 400,000-plus strong partner ecosystem to keep the AI hype train on track, with partners launching new practices to help customers move along their AI journeys and find the use cases that can evolve processes and whole businesses.