Manuel Zepeda and the Business of Knowing What Happens Next

A forecast is a peculiar product. Its value expires quickly, sometimes in minutes. A farmer deciding whether to spray a field, a fuel buyer watching inventories, or a utility crew tracking a storm does not need one more interesting fact. Each needs a defensible next move. Manuel Zepeda arrived at DTN in July 2026 to lead a company built around that narrow interval between knowing and doing. His route there ran through a different kind of infrastructure: telecom systems, enterprise software, and the testing machinery behind 5G networks. Yet the governing problem was much the same. Complicated signals must become decisions before the world changes again.

Zepeda has spent more than 30 years as an operator in public companies and private equity-backed businesses. He has led teams across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. DTN credits him with leadership roles in strategic transactions totaling more than $4 billion. Those numbers establish scale, but they do not quite explain the through-line. For that, it helps to go back to a comment he made in 2015, when he was running Amdocs in Latin America.

Telecom companies, he argued, often looked in the wrong place for loyalty. The network mattered. The bill mattered. The brand mattered. Still, he said, the decisive element was the customer’s experience. It was a commercially practical observation disguised as common sense. Technology could be intricate beyond description; customers would finally judge it by what happened to them.

“Carriers are losing a very important opportunity with their customers, which is providing them with a better customer experience.”Manuel Zepeda, 2015

The operator learns to translate

His career began in sales and client work. After a stint at Akili Systems, Zepeda joined BusinessEdge Solutions in 2000. BusinessEdge, later part of EMC Consulting, put him close to the unglamorous joints of enterprise technology: delivery, alliances, sales, and the promises made between a vendor and a client. He moved to Amdocs in 2005 and stayed for fourteen years, rising through client and regional leadership roles before becoming division president for the Caribbean and Latin America.

The assignment made him a translator among markets. Mobile operators were modernizing customer systems while smartphones, data plans, and digital services changed what subscribers expected. Regional leadership meant balancing a global product company with local economics, regulations, talent, and infrastructure. A tidy strategy deck could travel easily. Execution had to acquire an accent.

In 2016, Zepeda explained why Amdocs had chosen Guadalajara for a new center. His answer was revealingly plural. The city had an educated workforce and strong universities. It offered workable costs, international access, and connectivity. Amdocs already had hundreds of people there and expected to hire hundreds more. The center would combine software development, operations, and innovation instead of performing a single function.

This was not expansion as ribbon cutting. It was an attempt to assemble the conditions for work: talent, access, price, and a mandate broad enough to matter. Guadalajara would support Mexico and the wider Spanish-speaking market, with capabilities spanning the Internet of Things, mobile banking, big-data analytics, and network optimization. Zepeda’s argument was neither romantic nor bloodless. A place becomes strategic when its people and systems can do several useful things together.

When 5G met the working day

Zepeda joined Spirent Communications in 2019 as executive vice president of global sales and services. The timing placed him inside the awkward adolescence of 5G. The technology had escaped the laboratory, but the commercial world was still working out what it would become. Operators faced multivendor systems, cloud infrastructure, new security questions, and pressure to earn a return on enormous investments. Spirent’s role was to test and assure that the networks worked as intended.

In a 2023 industry report, Zepeda opened with a question: can a number paint a thousand words? His answer was 2,600, the total 5G customer engagements Spirent had completed by the end of 2022. Eight hundred had happened in that year alone, across more than 180 customers. The figure mattered to him because it measured adoption rather than applause.

Behind the large number was a list of stubborn questions. Would functions from different vendors work together? Could the network operate reliably in the cloud? Would low-latency promises survive real traffic? Was the system secure? Could testing keep pace with continuous software changes? These were engineering questions with commercial consequences. A failed feature was not merely a technical blemish. It could delay revenue, waste capital, or sour the experience Zepeda had been talking about since his Amdocs days.

He wrote that automation had become a constant across Spirent’s projects, promising agility and cost efficiency while the industry faced shortages in cloud, security, and automation skills. This was a useful caution against mistaking an impressive system for a self-operating one. The more elaborate the technology became, the more important its operating discipline.

His own writing during these years behaved like a running notebook of the industry’s practical anxieties. He examined what Apple’s adoption of eSIM might mean for carriers, asked how providers could make consumers care about 5G, and considered whether the Internet of Things opportunity was being overlooked. When offices emptied in 2020, his attention moved to remote-work security, exposed endpoints, and continuous security validation. The subjects changed quickly because the systems did. His recurring interest was slower and steadier: what new technology asks an operator to change on Monday morning.

That distinction matters. Executives are often rewarded for describing a distant future in handsome language. Zepeda’s public work tends to bring the future back to process. A dual-SIM phone rearranges a carrier relationship. A connected household enlarges the security perimeter. A cloud-native network changes how testing happens. The valuable question is rarely whether a trend sounds inevitable. It is whether the organization has built the skills, workflows, and customer understanding to make the trend useful.

The forecast after the network

DTN gives Zepeda a wider and more physical set of consequences. The company serves agriculture, refined fuels, aviation, marine and offshore operations, mining, transportation, utilities, and public safety. Its data can help shape when a road crew treats pavement, whether an outdoor event alters its plan, how a farmer reads market and field conditions, or how a fuel buyer responds to volatility. These decisions live where software meets weather, machinery, money, and occasionally mud.

The company appointed him while accelerating an AI-powered operational decisioning platform. The phrase can sound abstract until placed beside a storm track or a diesel shortage. Operational decisioning is the conversion of signals into a recommended action within a particular workflow. AI may improve speed and pattern recognition. Domain expertise supplies context. Proprietary data supplies the raw material. Trust determines whether anyone acts.

“I look forward to partnering with our customers and employees to accelerate innovation, expand our AI-enabled capabilities, and create even greater value for everyone we serve.”Manuel Zepeda on joining DTN, 2026

Zepeda’s early public comments as CEO favor partnership over prophecy. That fits a career spent in services, sales, and systems that need to work for someone else. DTN does not benefit merely by predicting a storm more elegantly. Its usefulness appears when a customer makes a quicker, safer, or more economical choice.

He also brings a specific view of organizational alignment. In a public reflection before joining DTN, Zepeda argued that companies often ask whether a person is talented without asking whether the person fits the challenge. Someone skilled at refining stable processes may struggle in a transformation role. A natural change agent may chafe when the work demands consistency. The job of leadership, in his formulation, is not collecting impressive people. It is arranging capability around the work.

Signals of a life beyond the dashboard

Executive biographies tend to turn people into collections of verbs: led, scaled, transformed, delivered. Zepeda’s public life offers a few gentler nouns. Animals, for one. He joined the board of Whisker Mountain, a nonprofit sanctuary, and used his professional network to help seek a grant writer. His earlier nonprofit service included the board of The Place of Forsyth County, a United Way agency.

He also publicly celebrated his daughter’s launch of a needlepoint business, taking visible delight in a young entrepreneur giving an old craft a contemporary turn. And when explaining alignment, he reached for football: Argentina’s stars accepting roles in service of a team built around Lionel Messi. The analogy is imperfect, as all sports analogies are, but it carries his point. Talent becomes performance through arrangement and consent.

In 2018, Zepeda was named to the HITEC 50 list of Hispanic technology leaders. In 2025, he contributed to a chapter about how leaders channel energy into organizational performance. The subjects may sound far apart from weather feeds and network assurance. They return, however, to the same practical fascination: what makes a complex collection of people and information move coherently?

That question now sits at the center of his work. DTN’s customers do not control the weather, commodity markets, or every link in a supply chain. They can control the quality and timing of their response. Zepeda has spent a career inside that distinction. At Amdocs, the work was the customer system behind the carrier. At Spirent, it was proof that the network could deliver what had been promised. At DTN, it is the decision made before rain falls, wind rises, or a market closes.

The technology changes. The deadline remains stubbornly human.