2019 FierceTelecom Rising Star — Dell EMC’s Kevin Shatzkamer

The FierceTelecom editorial team is proud to announce our Rising Stars series in which we’re profiling up-and-coming executives in the telecom industry. We’ve selected a slate of executives from services providers, public cloud companies and telco vendors whom we think are on the rise in 2019. We’ll be doling out the names of our winners, two per day, so that our readers have the time to enjoy reading their profiles. And next week, we’ll post a Rising Stars poll, giving everyone the opportunity to vote for their favorite top executive to watch in the FierceTelecom ecosystem. We hope you enjoy the series!

Kevin Shatzkamer wasn’t planning to get into tech. But after graduating with an MBA from Indiana University he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which paved the way for an internship with Nortel, where he worked on the next-generation of cellular technology.

That wireless experience helped him later in his career. After graduating from MIT, Shatzkamer took an internship with Cisco where he was tasked with learning about mobile and wireless technology and educating the rest of the company about it.

Shatzkamer worked at Cisco for 15 years where he was named “Distinguished Systems Engineer,” making him the youngest distinguished engineer at the company. He also was awarded more than 50 patents and published two books discussing the architectures and technologies that shaped the mobile internet including 2G, 3G and 4G networks.

Shatzkamer left Cisco to join Brocade in 2014 where he became CTO of the company’s service provider business. He says that while it was a difficult decision to leave Cisco, the move to Brocade gave him the experience he needed. While at Brocade he learned not only about technology but also how to scale an organization and handle mergers and acquisitions.

He joined Dell EMC in October 2016, and he is currently the vice president and general manager of service provider strategy and solutions for the company’s infrastructure solutions group. In this role, he is responsible for Dell EMC’s strategy and architecture around network infrastructure technologies, cloud, and virtualization platforms. He also oversees software programmability.

RELATED: Dell EMC teams up with VMware on integrated SD-WAN offering

That’s a big task. But Shatzkamer believes the future of telecom infrastructure is similar to cloud and IT and that the industry has to operate applications independent of vertical markets. This is a tough mindset to change. “Technology is the easy problem to solve,” he said. “It’s more taxing to solve operational and people problems.”

Nevertheless, he believes that the industry is making progress. “There are some bright spots,” he said. “I think we are starting to see momentum build.”