Sumit Dhawan
President
As President of VMware, Sumit Dhawan leads the company’s go-to-market functions including WW Sales, Customer Experience and Success, Strategic Ecosystem and Industry Solutions, Marketing, and Communications. With over 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Sumit is a seasoned executive with a proven track record of building and running market-leading businesses. He is a strong advocate for delivering an exceptional experience to customers and partners, and for supporting diverse teams, inclusive cultures and equitable environments that encourage the best in everyone.
Sumit previously served as VMware’s Chief Customer Experience Officer, managing global teams responsible for professional services, technical support and customer success. Prior to that, he was Chief Executive Officer of Instart, a startup delivering innovations in web application performance and security services.
Before leading Instart, Sumit served as the general manager of VMware’s End-User Computing business, establishing the company’s leadership in mobile and unified endpoint management and desktop virtualization. He has also held a number of executive roles at Citrix spanning the engineering, product development, marketing, and general management functions.
Sumit holds an MBA from the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, and a BS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
Surbhi Kaul
VP, Global Customer Experience
With 20 years of experience leading product design, development and strategy in Fortune 500 companies, Surbhi has built and led product and engineering teams at technology icons including Google, YouTube, Netflix, and Cisco. Over the last decade she has launched multiple successful & insightful products, many of which encompass AI and machine learning expertise. Additionally, Surbhi led query disambiguation and speech recognition efforts on leading edge Google Home and Google Assistant enabled devices using Google Cloud ML models. Currently Surbhi is leading Juniper’s Customer Experience charter focused on incorporating Juniper’s Experience-First Networking initiatives into every aspect of the customer journey. She is focused on building omnichannel engagements and ML based proactive and predictive support capabilities. Leveraging her EQ-based motivational leadership style, Surbhi is leading highly cross-functional initiatives enabling digital transformation of both services and enterprise business. Surbhi holds a Bachelor’s in Engineering from IIT Kanpur and a Master’s degree in computer science from Texas A&M University. She also holds General Management Program (GMP) degree from Harvard Business School. Surbhi leads Global Inclusion & Diversity initiatives at Juniper and is passionate about supporting and giving back to the IIT community. She is a key leader of the IIT Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning forum, a Board Member for IIT Kanpur Foundation, and the former President of IIT West Coast alumni association. She has also Chaired and led the “Women in Product” San Francisco Bay Area organization and is an active member of Chief.
