Influential Woman · Government IT Consulting

Megha Gupta

Senior Manager - Cloud Strategy & Operations, CDW

Southlake, TX

20Years experience

2Awards received

Certifications · Degrees · Memberships

Degree Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Economics Degree Master's Degree in Business Administration with focus on Information Technology Degree Diploma in Computer Engineering Cert IBM DB2 Certification Cert MySQL Certification Cert AWS Certifications

Her Story

About Megha

I've been with CDW for 20 years, and my journey has been one of continuous learning and taking on new challenges. I started as an IBM DB2 Database Administrator at an insurance company in Peoria before joining Verby in 2006, which was later acquired by CDW in 2007. For 15 years, I was a technical individual contributor, always raising my hand to learn new technologies. When the company needed MySQL engineers, I was one of the first to get certified and become a subject matter expert. I went on to master Oracle and SQL Server as well. In 2018, when CDW decided to move to the cloud era, I was one of the very first engineers to raise my hand and say yes, I want to learn AWS. I became an AWS technical architect and eventually led a team of engineers. Then I made the switch to management, leading our AWS managed services practice and growing that business from about $40-45 million to almost $70 million while managing a global team of 20-plus principal consultants and engineers. Two years ago, I took on my current role to help start a cloud team specifically for government customers - federal, state, and local. When I joined, we didn't have a whole lot of customers, but since then we've grown our Google practice and AWS practice significantly. I started as the only person on the team, and now my team has grown to 16-17 people. I'm a strong believer in always being a learner, and even though I don't work on day-to-day technology problems anymore, I'm still actively trying to learn what's new in cloud technologies and getting more certifications.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Megha

01What do you attribute your success to?

I attribute my success to hard work and dedication, but I also have to say family as well. My husband is a huge supporter. He's helped me tremendously in a lot of ways. There were times when I thought, I cannot do this, I have 3 kids, how am I gonna have a career? But he helped me tremendously to be a mom and be able to be a co-worker and be able to grow as well. Without that support, I don't think I would have been able to balance everything and achieve what I have in my career.

02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

The best career advice I've received is that the most important skills for a leader is to be able to learn and be able to do the things that you're expecting your team to do. So be the first one, show the path, and get your hands dirty before you ask your team to do it. This advice has really shaped how I lead - I don't ask my team to do anything I wouldn't do myself, and I make sure I understand the work deeply before delegating it.

03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?

My advice to young women entering the IT field is to focus on anything related to data. The data field is where everything is happening - whether that's analytics, machine learning, or any other data-related work, everything revolves around data. I know it's hard for young women and young kids coming into IT not knowing where they can find jobs, because there are a lot of moving parts and they don't know what's gonna happen. But I think as long as their field is around data, they should be able to find a good job and get a good career in that field. That's where the opportunities are.

04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?

Right now, the biggest challenge and opportunity both revolve around AI. The challenge is that there is just so much happening in AI that it's difficult to figure out where you want to put your head towards. But the opportunities are all around - managing data, how to make sense out of that data, data analytics, and of course AI. That's where the entire information technology field has been moving towards. Unfortunately, if you don't keep up with it, things change so dramatically that you feel that you've lost it. So keeping yourself up to date is even more important these days than it has been ever in the last 20-25 years. From my experience, AI has helped productivity significantly. What used to take me a couple of days to do, I've been able to finish in just a couple of hours with the help of AI, and that has helped me do more throughout my day.

05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?

Integrity and honesty are huge for me, both at work and at home. Those two principles are very important to me and guide everything I do. Whether I'm working with my team, my customers, or my family, I operate by these values. They're non-negotiable for me. I feel loyalty and trust toward my company, and that's rooted in these same principles of integrity and honesty. These values have helped me build strong relationships and maintain them over my 20-year career.

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