Top Cloud Executives to Watch in 2025

Dave Stepp

Cloud & Engineering Lead, Accenture Federal Services

Dave Stepp’s best work highlights the impact better technology experiences can create. His top recent achievement was innovating how Accenture Federal Services provides a unified command and control center for secure, efficient multi-cloud operations for federal agencies. The company’s Cloud Application Lifecycle Manager, or CALM, combines generative AI-enabled assets and accelerators to provide IT organizations with a single pane of glass for controlling workloads across multiple disparate environments.

One of Stepp’s favorite quotes is from The Lorax: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Why Watch

In 2025, his team is heavily focused on transitioning from DevOps to modern platform engineering. Platform engineering provides development teams with exponential productivity gains by promoting standardized tooling and reusable templates for deployments, in addition to consolidating security, operations and observability.

Accenture Federal Services CEO Ron Ash had high praise for Stepp.

“With his extensive experience supporting the federal government, Dave delivers innovative ideas and modern efficiencies precisely when they’re needed most,” he said.

Fun fact: Stepp was a swimmer growing up and raced Michael Phelps their entire childhood, although Stepp confesses he never beat him. “I did set my mark in music,” Stepp said. “I was once named the best saxophone player in Maryland.”