Chris Kapusta recently celebrated his second anniversary with GDT and currently serves as VP of Advisory & Transformation. In his role, he leads a team of portfolio leaders and national architects focused on developing innovative offerings and engaging clients strategically across data center, cloud, AI, networking, and security.
In this Q&A, Chris shares how his team works across the organization to help clients solve complex challenges, what excites him most about GDT’s direction, and the leadership mindset that guides his work.
How long have you been with GDT, and what does your role entail?
Chris: March was my two-year anniversary with GDT. My current role as VP Advisory & Transformation entails leading a group of portfolio leads who are responsible for developing, iterating, and creating offerings that our sales and architect teams can bring to market with our clients.
Also, I lead a group of national architects who are responsible for engaging our customers in a strategic fashion by helping them understand how we can map our robust technology and services portfolio to solve their business challenges and help them on their transformational journey.
Can you describe your team, your team’s role at GDT, and what makes your team dynamic and impactful?
Chris: They are all architects at heart, but we have broken the team into a couple of different responsibilities.
One side is the portfolio management team. When you look at our data center, cloud, AI, network, and security offerings, we need a team that is focused on understanding what the market is asking for, what our clients are asking for, and how to enable our sales team to successfully take those offerings and messages to market. The portfolio team is responsible for creating, iterating, and life-cycling our offerings and enabling our sales and architect teams to be successful in those areas.
We also have a group of national architects who have different expertise across the technology stack. When you think of networking, data center, cloud, and security, those can be independent. But our clients don’t think of them as silos; they think of them as holistic technologies that work together to solve their problems and drive their business forward. We intentionally brought together the national architect team to combine expertise across those areas, so we can approach clients strategically, while operating as a single entity that unifies those different stacks.
Your team recently went through some organizational changes. What part of this strategy excites you most?
Chris: I really think we have the proper alignment now. We have teams heavily focused on driving sales and success with our clients. We have great relationships and liaisons within our services organization. It’s about bringing technology and services together.
If we are only driving one of those for a client, we aren’t helping them to our full potential. From that perspective, I think we’re properly aligned to drive both technology and services, and we’ve put some measurements in place to understand the success of what we’re doing. Not only to solve client problems, but also to track internally what our measurement of success is and how we evaluate that success.
What goals or initiatives are your team focused on in 2026, and how do they support GDT’s broader mission?
Chris: I would say a big one is to be more strategic in how we engage our clients and how we engage with our sales teams. We want to help the sales team grow inside their client relationships, but we really want to show clients the broader breadth and depth of GDT.
There may be areas where we are only focused on the network or one of those silos with a client, and what I’ve asked the team to do is go out and show how we can help clients end-to-end. As GDT’s broader mission is to bring all capabilities together and approach it from a holistic engagement model, I think we are strongly aligned to drive that mission.
What’s a recent win—big or small—that made you proud?
Chris: There’s a lot to talk about, but one recent example was seeing the organization come together for a health insurance company out of Florida. They were struggling with their licensing renewal with Broadcom VMware. It had doubled in size from what they were expecting, so they came to GDT for help with determining the path forward, exploring alternatives, and developing a strategy to help them diminish their dependence on those technologies to realize some cost savings.
What started out as a workshop led to an assessment, which led to a service opportunity to migrate their entire environment from VMware to an alternative hypervisor.
What’s exciting is that they asked us to do this during an integral time for their business: open enrollment. When you are in health insurance, open enrollment is like the Super Bowl, so we had to do everything with no disruption to their environment. They couldn’t have downtime when people were trying to enroll and were dependent on those services being available. The team came together from across professional services, managed services, and advisory to develop a holistic solution for getting the client to a successful end state.
I’m proud to say we did it with no disruption to the environment. Users went home on Friday on one system and came in Monday, not knowing there was a change, which was great feedback from the client. That was a great example of all of GDT coming together to solve a client problem.
Who or what inspires you in your career, and why?
Chris: I’ve been lucky through my career to have a core set of mentors who have guided me from a starry-eyed entry level in the working world to where I am today. I have a handful of people I’ve relied on throughout my career that I go to for advice, guidance, and even just as a sounding board for ideas and questions. I’ve been very lucky from that perspective to have a core set of people that I can lean on for advice and mentorship.
What’s one professional goal you’re currently working toward, and how are you approaching it?
Chris: I think one that is near and dear to me is how to be a better leader. I’ve been fortunate in my career to be able to lead some very amazing teams, this one included, and when you’re leading high-performing and very talented people, you want to give them all the support, mentorship, and opportunities they deserve in their careers.
So one thing that is very important to me is how to be a better leader, bring up those around me, and train those who will step into positions like this and ensure that I am giving everybody the opportunity, career pathing, and experience they are looking for in their fulfillment and professional careers. I’ve had the opportunity to go through some GDT-provided training on leadership, I read a lot, and listen to audiobooks to better myself. It’s a constant learning process for me to make sure I’m not letting those around me down.
What’s your favorite GDT core value, and how do you see it in action—either in your work or across the company?
Chris: I think the easy one for me is: we invite innovation. We help our clients transform, but GDT is going through transformation as well. So innovation is what drives us to be better, be creative, and solve client problems and issues. At the rate the industry is changing, especially with AI and other technologies, we have to have constant innovation to be better and make more effective use of these technologies.
If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and why?
Chris: Northern Italy is on my bucket list. My father is from northern Italy and came to the U.S. when he was about five years old. We have a lot of family that we’ve met over video but haven’t met in person, so that’s on the list before we lose that chance—to see where a lot of our roots are from.
Tell us more about yourself outside of work, what are your hobbies and interests?
Chris: I actually like to disconnect from technology as much as possible. I am a foodie, so cooking is huge for me. I love to see what we can create in the kitchen and experiment with different flavors, so that is a journey that never gets old. We also try to do as many outdoor activities as possible, so in the winter it’s downhill skiing, and in the summer it’s hiking and trips up to the mountains. The last thing is traveling. The world is a big place. We have two daughters, so we are trying to show them how big the world is and how much opportunity is out there!
Thank you, Chris, for sharing a little about yourself and the role you play in making GDT a great place to work. To learn more about our culture and the people behind it, visit our careers page and explore our current career opportunities.
