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SolarWinds Celebrates Six Honorees on the 2026 Women of the Channel List

SolarWinds announced that CRN® — a brand of The Channel Company — has recognized six SolarWinds leaders on the prestigious 2026 Women of the Channel list. 

Among the honorees, Barb Huelskamp, Vice President of Global Channel and Alliances, has also been named to the elite Power 100, recognizing the most influential women leaders in the channel.

This annual CRN list celebrates women from vendors, distributors, solution providers and other channel-focused organizations who make a positive difference in the IT ecosystem. The CRN 2026 Women of the Channel honorees are innovative and strategic leaders committed to advancing channel excellence and supporting the success of their partners and customers.

2026 SolarWinds Honorees for Women of the Channel

  • Barb Huelskamp, Vice President, Global Channel and Alliances, SolarWinds
  • Catherine O'Driscoll, Senior Director of Marketing, SolarWinds
  • Chelsea White, Director, Marketing, SolarWinds
  • Gina Wilmek, Channel Manager, Federal, SolarWinds
  • Giselle Sanchez, Channel Account Manager, SolarWinds
  • Joo Sohn, Director, Global Partner Programs, SolarWinds

“I have the privilege of working alongside this team every day, and I can tell you that this recognition is well-earned,” said Andre Cuenin, Chief Revenue Officer, SolarWinds. “What makes these six leaders exceptional isn't just what they deliver — it's how they do it. They bring genuine care to every partner relationship and to each other, and that energy is contagious. I'm incredibly proud of each of them."

The six SolarWinds honorees represent a cross-functional team of channel leaders driving impact across partner programs, marketing, federal sales, and global alliances. Together, they reflect SolarWinds deep commitment to building a partner-first culture — one grounded in enablement, trust, and long-term mutual growth. Their collective work contributes to stronger partner relationships and accelerated growth across SolarWinds global ecosystem.

“It’s a privilege to celebrate the remarkable achievements of these women who are driving meaningful change across the IT channel,” said Jennifer Follett, VP of U.S. Content and Executive Editor, CRN at The Channel Company. “Each honoree has demonstrated exceptional leadership and a commitment to bold, innovative strategies that fuel transformation, growth, and success for their organizations and the broader channel. We’re proud to recognize their impact and look forward to seeing how they continue to shape the future of our industry.”

“Being recognized alongside five incredible SolarWinds colleagues makes this honor even more special,” said Huelskamp. “Recognitions like this belong as much to our partners as they do to us — my best days are spent with my team learning about their businesses and finding new ways to drive impact together. As we continue to evolve our partner program, I'm energized by the leadership these women bring every day, and by the trust our partners continue to place in all of us."

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

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SolarWinds Celebrates Six Honorees on the 2026 Women of the Channel List

SolarWinds announced that CRN® — a brand of The Channel Company — has recognized six SolarWinds leaders on the prestigious 2026 Women of the Channel list. 

Among the honorees, Barb Huelskamp, Vice President of Global Channel and Alliances, has also been named to the elite Power 100, recognizing the most influential women leaders in the channel.

This annual CRN list celebrates women from vendors, distributors, solution providers and other channel-focused organizations who make a positive difference in the IT ecosystem. The CRN 2026 Women of the Channel honorees are innovative and strategic leaders committed to advancing channel excellence and supporting the success of their partners and customers.

2026 SolarWinds Honorees for Women of the Channel

  • Barb Huelskamp, Vice President, Global Channel and Alliances, SolarWinds
  • Catherine O'Driscoll, Senior Director of Marketing, SolarWinds
  • Chelsea White, Director, Marketing, SolarWinds
  • Gina Wilmek, Channel Manager, Federal, SolarWinds
  • Giselle Sanchez, Channel Account Manager, SolarWinds
  • Joo Sohn, Director, Global Partner Programs, SolarWinds

“I have the privilege of working alongside this team every day, and I can tell you that this recognition is well-earned,” said Andre Cuenin, Chief Revenue Officer, SolarWinds. “What makes these six leaders exceptional isn't just what they deliver — it's how they do it. They bring genuine care to every partner relationship and to each other, and that energy is contagious. I'm incredibly proud of each of them."

The six SolarWinds honorees represent a cross-functional team of channel leaders driving impact across partner programs, marketing, federal sales, and global alliances. Together, they reflect SolarWinds deep commitment to building a partner-first culture — one grounded in enablement, trust, and long-term mutual growth. Their collective work contributes to stronger partner relationships and accelerated growth across SolarWinds global ecosystem.

“It’s a privilege to celebrate the remarkable achievements of these women who are driving meaningful change across the IT channel,” said Jennifer Follett, VP of U.S. Content and Executive Editor, CRN at The Channel Company. “Each honoree has demonstrated exceptional leadership and a commitment to bold, innovative strategies that fuel transformation, growth, and success for their organizations and the broader channel. We’re proud to recognize their impact and look forward to seeing how they continue to shape the future of our industry.”

“Being recognized alongside five incredible SolarWinds colleagues makes this honor even more special,” said Huelskamp. “Recognitions like this belong as much to our partners as they do to us — my best days are spent with my team learning about their businesses and finding new ways to drive impact together. As we continue to evolve our partner program, I'm energized by the leadership these women bring every day, and by the trust our partners continue to place in all of us."

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...