1987/B.Tech/AE Executive Vice President, Walmart California, USA
Dr. Suresh Kumar received his Bachelor’s of Technology in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Madras in 1987. He went on to pursue a Ph.D. in engineering from Princeton in 1992. He has had a distinguished career of 25 years as a tech executive in retail and e-commerce, advertising, cloud, and machine learning.
He is currently working as the executive vice president, global chief technology officer (CTO) and chief development officer (CDO) of Walmart, Inc. He started out as a Research Staff Member with IBM from 1992-99 and has five patents and several awards to his name within IBM including two for Outstanding Technical Achievement. He served at Amazon for around 15 years and oversaw its Worldwide Retail Systems and Retail Services as the Vice President where he held various other key leadership roles throughout his tenure and helped Amazon’s retail business to scale and grow tenfold by automating all of its internal processes, including demand forecasting, pricing optimization, promotional merchandising, and vendor management. He began operations with Microsoft in 2014 as the corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and operations, where he was responsible for planning, delivering, operating, and managing all physical infrastructure for cloud services. He left Microsoft for Google, where he was Vice President and General Manager of Google display, video, app ads and analytics. In 2019 Suresh joined Walmart, the world’s largest corporation by revenue and number of employees, and has been successfully leading it.
Suresh is a global leader. His organization, Walmart Global Tech, includes technologists from across the world who power all of Walmart’s businesses, including Walmart, Sam’s Club and Walmart International. He received considerable acclaim in the industry to have lead Walmart’s tech-driven efforts in the unprecedented circumstances during the Covid-19 crisis. Suresh is responsible for technology products and solutions for more than 2 million employees worldwide and Walmart’s 265 million customers in 27 countries – a truly remarkable achievement, indeed.
For his immense accomplishments in the field of tech, retail, and e-commerce, IIT Madras and its Alumni are proud to confer this award upon Dr. Suresh Kumar.
