Pythian Leaders Land Three CRN Finalist Spots

An awards shortlist is a peculiar kind of applause: everyone hears it, but the final bow must wait. For Pythian, September brought three reasons to listen. Vanessa Simmons and Solange Jacob earned finalist places in the 2026 CRN Women of the Year Awards, putting partnership building, mentoring and cloud leadership into the same frame. The official finalist roster names Simmons in two categories and Jacob in one.

Simmons is in contention for Channel Innovator of the Year—Solution Provider and Executive Mentor of the Year. Jacob is a Woman of the Year—Solution Provider finalist. The distinction matters. These are three finalist honors for two people; the winners will be announced later. For now, the interesting story sits behind the invitations: who gets an enterprise ready to use AI, and who prepares the people expected to make it work?

Simmons builds the connections—and the careers

Simmons is Pythian’s senior vice president of business development and managing director for Canada. In its September announcement, Pythian credits her with strengthening strategic partnerships and creating opportunities for women in technology. It describes programs that develop technical knowledge, confidence at executive level and professional relationships. That is the documented mentoring work behind the second finalist category, although the announcement supplies no program-by-program participation figures.

The partnership work has a longer paper trail. Pythian’s 2022 account of Simmons’ Power 70 recognition described her as the point of contact for its cloud and software partners, including Google Cloud, SAP, Oracle, Snowflake, Microsoft and Amazon. It linked those relationships to the company’s planning, deployment and management services. This was already a job of connecting organizations with different products, priorities and customers.

An alliance may begin with a handshake; delivery demands rather more. The useful question is whether the people on either side can turn that agreement into something a customer can buy and use. Mentoring belongs naturally beside that task. A promising colleague needs the knowledge to answer a difficult question, the confidence to ask one and the relationships to get an answer.

The awards themselves make the connection explicit. The organizer’s category descriptions recognize channel innovation through business change and original thinking, while the mentor award concerns helping women develop skills and advance into leadership. Simmons’ two places on the shortlist put both kinds of work under consideration.

“

…the breadth of what they represent—from innovation and business leadership to mentorship and the development of others.”

Brooks Borcherding · CEO, Pythian
On the finalist honors, in Pythian’s announcement

Jacob faces the adoption question

Jacob leads Pythian’s Google Cloud practice as vice president, Google Cloud. Pythian says she helped bring its Gemini Centre of Excellence to market and that the initiative has enabled more than 70,000 employees across customer organizations to adopt and use AI effectively. That reach is Pythian’s reported figure, rather than a measurement published by the award judges.

Her applicant-supplied profile on CRN describes leadership of project managers, change managers and technical experts, along with project management and change-practitioner credentials. Read together, those responsibilities suggest a familiar enterprise challenge: introducing a tool means coordinating the people who will approve it, configure it, teach it and use it.

A demonstration can make AI look effortless. Monday morning is a sterner audience. An employee still has to decide which task warrants the tool, what information can go into it and whether the result deserves to leave the screen. The practical interest in Jacob’s practice is how it helps employees make those decisions repeatedly.

What the Centre of Excellence actually offers

Pythian’s Workspace Centre of Excellence outline sets out a six-month methodology. It includes a two-hour introductory workshop, a portal with prompt guides and videos, skills sessions and office hours. Departmental workshops, an internal champion program and usage and collaboration metrics follow. The sequence gives the company’s adoption claim something concrete to examine: instruction, continued help and a way to observe use.

Office hours are an unglamorous item in an AI brochure, which is precisely their charm. They leave room for the question that appears only after training, when a real document refuses to behave like the example. Departmental sessions also acknowledge that a sales team and a customer support team may need quite different kinds of assistance.

A separate Pythian QuickStart case study illustrates its approach to measurement. The company describes surveys before and after workshops, then reports employee estimates of time saved on tasks such as drafting emails, updating spreadsheets and preparing for meetings. The customers are unnamed. Those accounts offer examples of the work being assessed; they do not establish a productivity result for every employee included in the Centre’s reported reach.

Pythian’s current Gemini Enterprise services also distinguish employee adoption from the development and governance of custom AI agents. Its offer includes training and internal champion networks alongside engineering work. The distinction helps explain the breadth of the leadership task: a workforce learning to use AI and a team maintaining automated processes require different forms of support.

Recognition has its own evidence

CRN says judges selected finalists from more than 300 applicants across 19 individual categories and two company categories. CRN editors and members of the wider channel community will choose the winners. It also says the biographies accompanying its finalist coverage are unedited submissions from applicants. The shortlist is external recognition; the accompanying descriptions of commercial achievement retain their original authorship.

There is earlier recognition in the record, too. In May 2026, Pythian announced that Simmons and Karen Pfeifer had made the Women of the Channel Power 80 Solution Provider list, with Rebecca Carson and Donna Williston also recognized on the broader list. September’s Women of the Year shortlist is a separate competition. Keeping the names of the programs straight preserves what each honor actually says.

The next date is December 8

The story now has an appointment. Winners are scheduled to be announced on December 8, 2026, at Pier Sixty in New York. The gala organizer lists a 7 p.m. start, with an after-party to follow.

Until then, the shortlist offers a useful view of the work surrounding enterprise AI: partnerships that bring services to customers, mentoring that prepares future leaders, and support that helps employees put unfamiliar software to use. The champagne has a date. The work already has names.

Follow the sources

1. Pythian’s September 2026 announcement ↗
2. CRN’s selection process and finalist profiles ↗
3. Official 2026 finalist roster ↗
4. Awards gala and category criteria ↗
5. Simmons’ 2022 partnership record ↗
6. Pythian’s May 2026 recognition ↗
7. Workspace Centre of Excellence outline ↗
8. Pythian’s QuickStart case study ↗
9. Gemini Enterprise services ↗