F5 Leaders Recognized in CRN's Women of the Channel; Lisa Citron Highlighted on CRN Power 100
F5 is proud to celebrate that 17 of our leaders have been named to the 2025 CRN® Women of the Channel list, which honors women across the IT channel for their vision, dedication, and contributions to the partner ecosystem. These F5 honorees represent a wide range of expertise, leadership, and impact throughout our channel organization.
Among them is Lisa Citron, Vice President of Global Partner Ecosystem, who has also been named to the CRN Power 100—a prestigious distinction reserved for the 100 most influential women in the channel. Citron’s recognition highlights her global impact and leadership as F5’s channel chief, driving partner success and strategic growth at scale.
In addition to Citron, women hold several of the top leadership roles in F5’s channel organization, underscoring the strength and diversity of our team, such as:
- Sarah Woods, Vice President, Global Field & Channel Marketing
- Stephanie Nalick, Regional Vice President, North America Channel Sales
- Nicole Steele, Senior Director, Field & Channel Marketing
These leaders—and all of F5’s honorees—are helping shape the future of the channel through strategy, innovation, and a commitment to delivering value for partners and customers alike.
“It’s an honor to recognize the outstanding accomplishments of these women, who are leaders and change-makers in the IT channel,” said Jennifer Follett, VP, U.S. Content and Executive Editor, CRN at The Channel Company. “Each woman spotlighted on this list has shown exceptional dedication to building creative strategies that propel transformation, growth, and success for their organizations and the entire IT channel. We are pleased to spotlight their important contributions and look forward to their future success.”
We’re proud to celebrate the achievements of all 17 F5 honorees and recognize the energy, insight, and excellence they bring to our partner ecosystem every day.
Congratulations to all F5 2025 CRN Women of the Channel honorees:
Lisa Citron, Vice President, Global Partner Ecosystem
As the Vice President of Global Partner Ecosystem, Lisa Citron is responsible for building and leading an ecosystem-centric go-to-market strategy to drive global revenue growth of F5 solutions and establish the company as a leader in multicloud application security and delivery services through all commercial routes to market. Over the past year, Citron has spent time with F5 partners and, based on their feedback and market insights, has changed how F5 brings strategy to partners and gained incremental investments to help them succeed in capturing expanded market opportunities.
Sarah Woods, Vice President, Global Field & Channel Marketing
Woods' global leadership role spans field and partner marketing across North America, EMEA, APCJ, and Latin America. Her remit includes digital, field, solutions, partner, and technology alliance marketing. She is a seasoned business-to-business technology marketing leader with software and cybersecurity expertise. In the past year, Woods led the transformation of F5's global partner marketing strategy by unifying partner communications and collaborating closely with sales leadership. This improved understanding between F5 and its partners, ensuring a consistent experience across campaigns and events. Partner-initiated opportunities aligned to F5 priorities also grew during this period.
Stephanie Nalick, Regional Vice President, North America Channel Sales
Stephanie Nalick is a dynamic and strategic channel sales leader with over 25 years of experience driving consistent revenue growth and expanding market share. She is an expert in strategic business planning, with a proven ability to build and nurture partner relationships, align leadership, and inspire high-performing teams. Over the past year, Nalick led her team to surpass sales targets, earned the prestigious Platinum Club award, navigated significant team changes while maintaining high morale and productivity, invested time in women's leadership events, and broadened her education to enhance her business leadership and customer experience skills.
Nicole Steele, Senior Director, Field & Channel Marketing
Nicole Steele is a distinguished partner marketing professional with a 22-year track record of strengthening partner ecosystems, driving revenue growth and surpassing performance metrics. Her expertise lies in crafting programs that yield partner financial gains, forging long-lasting relationships, and developing exceptional experiences. Responsible for field and channel marketing initiatives, Steele contributed to F5's channel in 2024 by recruiting a new Senior Channel Marketing Manager for North America, reorganizing the North America channel marketing department, mentoring and coaching North America channel marketing staff, and helping to plan AppWorld, F5's annual flagship event.
Jill Alm, Senior Channel Marketing Manager
Jill Alm is a dynamic marketing professional with over 20 years of experience, currently serving as Senior Channel Marketing Manager at F5. With over five years dedicated to the North America Channel Marketing team, she excels in developing and executing comprehensive marketing strategies for national partners, encompassing digital, content, social, and event marketing. Over the past year, Alm developed GTM plans with partners, launched national marketing programs, and generated leads through use case campaigns. She secured speaking opportunities, created co-branded assets, drove high engagement in AI and API Security programs, and deepened partner relationships, fostering new opportunities.
Chloe Carreau, Senior Global Channel Marketing Manager
Chloe Carreau has been a vital part of the F5 channel team since 2018, deeply engaging with the partner ecosystem and consistently advocating for the value that channel partners bring to the organization. Recently promoted to Senior Channel Marketing Manager, Carreau has played a key role in managing the global Partner Investment Program (MDF), supporting hundreds of partners globally, and enhancing internal processes for F5's channel teams. Over the past year, Carreau has streamlined internal processes, managed weekly registration updates and demand generation tools for F5's flagship event, successfully migrated the MDF platform and delivered ongoing enhancements, and actively engaged in Toastmasters, showcasing her dedication to communication, innovation, and professional growth.
Linda Caudle, Director, Marketing
Linda Caudle is a veteran marketer with more than 20 years of experience in tech and the channel. As the Director of Marketing at F5, she focuses on delivering impactful marketing strategies to drive business growth and enhance sales partnerships. With a deep understanding of partner marketing and digital media, Linda has played a critical role in reinforcing F5's market position through strategic alliances. In the past year, Caudle led an initiative to restructure the North American channel marketing team to balance regional and national efforts. She spearheaded initiatives to enhance partner enablement, boost demand generation, streamline GTM processes, and strengthen alignment with partners. Caudle also collaborated with the channel team to launch packaged programs globally.
Julie Cox, Global Partner Marketing Manager
Joining F5 in January 2024, Julie Cox brings significant channel marketing experience to the team, having worked amongst some of the world's leading technology vendors, distributors, partners, and channel marketing agencies. Cox plays a key role in the F5 Global Partner Marketing team and works to deliver a seamless and unified co-marketing experience to F5 ecosystem partners. Highlights of Cox’s first year in the role include successfully driving the re-energization of F5 global channel marketing campaigns. Cox has also led a project to extensively review and redesign F5's global partner demand generation program with a longer-term view to launching a new programmatic and measurable approach.
Kelly Curnow, Senior Director, Partner Enablement & Experience
Kelly Curnow is a results-driven channel leader who excels at developing and executing channel enablement strategies that increase partner productivity and satisfaction. As Senior Director of Partner Enablement & Experience at F5, she is responsible for providing partners with the collateral, training, processes, technology, and data infrastructure that make it easier to sell and renew F5 solutions. In 2024, Kelly was awarded F5 Platinum Club for contributions to the company's Business and IT Transformation project. This company-wide cross-functional program delivers the core business and technology capabilities needed to enable F5’s future-state, drive standardization and simplicity in core business processes, and streamline and modernize F5’s data and application estate.
Mistie Hughes-Garza, Senior Global Partner Manager – WWT
With over two decades of experience in the technology and partner management sectors, Mistie Hughes-Garza has established a proven track record of excellence and leadership. Currently, she serves as the Senior Global Partner Manager covering WWT, where she has been with F5 for over 11 years, contributing significantly to the company's success and growth. In her role, Hughes-Garza manages and nurtures key global partnerships remotely from the United States, leveraging her extensive industry knowledge and strategic insight. Over the past year, she has focused on pinpointing the strategic intersections between F5 and WWT, areas of alignment that will accelerate both companies' initiatives in solving mutual customers’ biggest challenges.
Jenny Kendrick, Partner Technical Advisor – U.S. & Canada West Partners
Jenny Kendrick, Partner Technical Advisor for F5 Inc., has 2 years of experience working in Channel Sales, providing technical training and advising to F5 Channel Partners in the West U.S. and Canada. Kendrick’s key channel-related accomplishments in 2024 were building tools and resources to provide to F5’s channel partner engineers and sellers so they can do technical discovery and align use cases with F5 solutions. Kendrick provides technical training, workshops, webinars, one-on-one sessions, and a monthly technical newsletter to help educate partners on how F5 solutions align F5’s and F5’s partners' go-to-market priorities, as well as customer use cases.
Gimena Martinez Llorente, Director, Marketing LATAM
Gimena Martinez Llorente, Director of Marketing at LATAM, has 15+ years of integrated marketing experience for technology companies with strengths in relationship building, business strategy, lead generation, and partnership development. Llorente's channel-related accomplishments in 2024 include data-driven initiatives to collect metrics to measure channel investment ROI, collaborating with the LATAM channel team to support partner initiatives and reach revenue targets, and evangelizing partners to create significant customer experiences, including LATAM's flagship event, Revolution, a holistic experience that includes enablement, awareness, maturation, and loyalty.
Kat McClure, Global Partner Ecosystem Marketing Director
Kat McClure is the Global Partner Ecosystem Marketing Director for F5, Inc., responsible for leading and managing a global team of marketing managers to create a unified approach to partner marketing for the organization worldwide. With two decades of experience in marketing, McClure is a seasoned professional specializing in marketing programs across the partner ecosystem. At F5, McClure oversees strategic partner campaign development, centralized asset creation, local execution guidance, partner MDF, and ROI tracking. McClure contributed to F5's channel in 2024 by leading staff in implementing a new partner go-to-market communication framework, as well as building a partner demand generation center and a partner go-to-market deliverables portfolio, including events-in-a-box and pre-built campaigns for demand generation. McClure also improved MDF platform metrics from partner engagement, go-to-market, collaboration, and tracking perspectives.
Tania McIntosh, Director, Global Partner Programs
With over 20 years of experience in marketing and sales, Tania McIntosh brings a broad skill set to the channel. McIntosh currently serves as the Director of Global Partner Programs at F5, overseeing the company's partner program, operations, and incentives. Over the past year, McIntosh has focused on aligning F5's strategic initiatives with F5’s channel go-to-market priorities while leading one of the key initiatives. Additionally, McIntosh played a crucial role as a core team member, overseeing two workstreams in the development of F5’s next-generation partner program.
Erin Oettle, Senior Channel Program Manager – North America
Erin Oettle manages the F5 Unity+ Partner Program for North America. Oettle has been directly focused on managing channel programs and marketing for the past 14 years and indirectly since the start of her career in 1998. Oettle has been with F5 since November 2015. Oettle has a hand in making Unity+ a valuable partner program, from managing requirements and benefits to creating profitable incentives, planning and executing our Partner Advisory Councils, and the partner experience at F5’s premier Application Security and Delivery Conference, AppWorld.
Nadine Singer, Senior Channel Operations Manager
In her current role, Nadine Singer leads operational initiatives to streamline processes, enhance both the partner experience and the internal channel team experience, and drive overall efficiency. In 2024, Singer contributed to a company-wide initiative to upgrade systems supporting internal operations and processes while migrating F5’s PRM to improve the external partner experience. This extensive project involved rebuilding systems from the ground up, evaluating existing processes, and implementing efficiencies to drive operational improvements.
Ella Steere, Senior Regional Channel Manager, Pacific Northwest & Western Canada
Ella Steere serves as a Senior Regional Channel Manager, where she works with OEMs and the partner ecosystem that fuels the Pacific Northwest, Western Canada, and F5's largest technology customers. Over the past year, Steere worked to sign net new logo customers to F5 with Platinum Tier channel partners, resulting in multimillion-dollar global sales. Steere achieved this in part by leveraging strategic on-site meetings at F5 headquarters for partner teams to bring in customers where F5 had not sold into; a three-month turn from the headquarters meetings resulted in new sales.
Congratulations to the F5 team and all the 2025 winners for their efforts to advance channel excellence and support the success of their partners and customers!
For more information on F5’s partner programs, visit www.f5.com/partners.