Umesh Lakshman is currently the Solutions Architecture Vice President leading Channels and Mid-Markets at Lumen technologies. Prior to this role he led the Enterprise West segment and the Media and entertainment vertical at Lumen since 2021. Before Lumen, he was a Sr.Sales engineering leader at Cisco building teams interfacing with some of the most influential brands in the world - the cloud providers.
While driving technical relevancy, strategy, and creating business outcomes through talented people and teams, world-class products and innovative technology are his charter, creating a tomorrow that is diverse, inclusive, and congruent to our society is a personal passion.
Growing up to progressive parents in a conservative society, Umesh was oblivious to the power of privilege. Post attainment of his Master's degree and joining the tech sector in sales engineering, Umesh found diversity severely lacking in the domain. Through multiple roles and engagements, he saw the stark contrast between the diverse representation in society vs what he saw in engineering as a whole.
Through leading a local non-profit chapter through exponential growth focusing on funding education for underprivileged children in India, and in parallel moving into people and organizational leadership in sales engineering, the passion to change the landscape was ignited. It was time to put power, privilege, and position to work to effect incremental, yet tangible change.
During his tenure at Cisco, he was one of the core members of Men for Inclusion, an employee resource organization that focuses on building male allyship. Its vision, "a world without the need for MFI". Umesh has authored many blogs on diversity and inclusion as well as spoken both within and in the public domain around Allyship, converting passion into action, reality-based leadership, embracing change and creating success and many more.
Umesh also recently launched "Breaking Boundaries", a YouTube channel video-cast/Spotify podcast where he will be interviewing everyday heroes in the DEI realm to share their journey without holding any punches. The goal is to highlight people's journey as they transcend stereotypes and create an inclusive future for themselves and others.
Breaking boundaries can be found online on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.