LEADERSHIP · EXECUTIVE PROFILE
Colombian by heritage, Detroit-born, and nearly three decades into a technology-sector career that has passed through Covisint, T-Systems, Softtek, Globant, AWS, HITEC, and now HC3, Andre Arbelaez runs his work on a method he has been refining since he was eighteen: push up the Hispanic executives whose work deserves more visibility, and pull up the next generation waiting behind them. HC3's flagship convening, held annually in partnership with the NFL, is the method at scale.
By Rafael Magaña · July 25, 2026 · ~8 minute read
EDITORIAL · RECORD №00101 · MMXXVI
Reported, Spring 2026.
IN BRIEF
- Andre Arbelaez is President & CEO of the Hispanic C-Suite Corporate Council (HC3), a leadership organization built around the advocacy, accountability, and appreciation of Hispanic C-suite leaders across the United States.
- Before HC3, he served as President of the Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC) — which he joined at its 2007 founding — and held senior roles at Amazon Web Services, Globant, Softtek USA (as Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer), T-Systems, and Covisint LLC.
- Colombian by heritage and Detroit-born, Arbelaez traces his method — Pushing Up and Pulling Up — to a freshman fraternity presidency at Northwood University and to his early work with Detroit's Hispanic Business Alliance.
- HC3's flagship annual convening is the Hispanic NFL Draft Celebration, launched with the National Football League in Detroit in 2024, hosted in Green Bay in 2025, and held in Pittsburgh on April 22, 2026 — a multi-day business conference at the intersection of professional sports and Hispanic corporate leadership.
- He chairs the Advisory Board of the Information and Decision Sciences Department at Oakland University and serves as a Director of the Michigan Council of Women in Technology Foundation. Latino Leaders magazine has called him the Technology Diversity Guru.
Step into the executive suites of major American professional sports franchises or corporate boardrooms today, and you’ll notice a shift in the room's composition. Behind much of that quiet momentum is Andre Arbelaez. Driven by an operating philosophy he calls Pushing Up and Pulling Up, Arbelaez has spent his career mastering a dual imperative: shattering ceilings for himself while building the infrastructure for the next generation of Hispanic C-suite leaders to climb.
Arbelaez is President and CEO of the Hispanic C-Suite Corporate Council, better known as HC3. The organization exists to concentrate a body of work — the advocacy, accountability, and appreciation of Hispanic C-suite leaders — into a single seat at the table. HC3 is the third act of a career built across the enterprise technology sector, and the method predates all three.
Arbelaez is Colombian by heritage and Detroit by biography. He was born in Detroit, spent his first five years in Colombia with family, and returned to Michigan in 1975. He has lived in the region ever since. That double biography — the Latin American origin, the American upbringing — is not decoration. It is the source of the operating instinct he later brought to every organization he built.
"I truly found out who I was when I was 18," he recalls. As a freshman at Northwood University, Arbelaez was elected president of the Interfraternity Council, a position rarely handed to an underclassman. "I had a mustache, so I think that helped me look a little older," he says. "But the role gave me an incredible education in how to deal with administration and help the fraternities achieve their goals while maintaining leadership independence." The mustache went; the education stayed.
The next education came from his mother. Arbelaez's mother founded PALS International, a translation and language-instruction company, and Arbelaez grew up working alongside her — which meant growing up inside the Hispanic business community of Detroit. That proximity led him to the Hispanic Business Alliance (HBA), a small-business chamber, where he eventually rallied a group of friends to expand the scope of what the alliance could do.
Under Arbelaez and the HBA board, the alliance launched Hispanic Night with the Detroit Pistons and Fiesta Tigres with the Detroit Tigers — two convenings that treated visibility as a public good and gave Hispanic-owned businesses proximity to two of the region's largest cultural institutions. "This was my first professional taste of leadership outside of college and in the community," Arbelaez explains. "It's also where I learned the importance of networking and friendships."
Those two words — networking and friendships — are the operating pillars of the method he would eventually take national.
Detroit was the training ground; the enterprise technology sector was the platform. Over the next two decades, Arbelaez held senior positions across some of the industry's largest global platforms — from Covisint LLC, the automotive global portal jointly owned by General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, PSA, and Renault, through T-Systems; Softtek USA, where he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer; Globant, Argentina's largest technology firm; and Amazon Web Services, as a Principal Global Account Executive. In 2007, he joined the Hispanic IT Executive Council — better known as HITEC — at its founding. It was a coalition of Fortune 1000 Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, and senior technology leaders of Hispanic heritage, and it was the first room of its kind in American business. By 2011, Arbelaez was HITEC's president. During that tenure, Latino Leaders magazine named him the Technology Diversity Guru — shorthand for a role he took seriously, and continues to hold in a new form.
Along the way, Arbelaez has become one of the more sought-after Hispanic voices on technology, diversity and inclusion, and the future of smart cities, having delivered keynotes and panels at venues ranging from the White House to United Nations Headquarters to Silicon Valley.
"As a culture, Hispanic people are incredibly humble. We have a hard time discussing our successes. But there exists an opportunity for us to leverage how others talk about our successes."
The Pushing Up half of the method is about visibility. When someone arrives at a career moment worth documenting — a promotion, a board seat, a company milestone — Arbelaez believes the community around that person has a responsibility to say so, loudly. "As a culture, Hispanic people are incredibly humble," he says. "We have a hard time discussing our successes. But there exists an opportunity for us to leverage how others talk about our successes." The corollary follows: when you reach a platform of your own, you use it to push others up.
The Pulling Up half is the harder discipline. It is what you owe the next person once you have been pushed up yourself. "We want to help others get visibility that they would not traditionally get on their own — we want to put them in the spotlight," Arbelaez says. "But we also want to make sure that they understand the responsibility to turn around and build that same pathway for someone else."
HC3 is the current expression of both halves. Where HITEC concentrated on technology, HC3 spans C-suites across sectors — finance, marketing, operations, legal, technology. The audience is broader. The method is the same. The room is bigger.
The clearest expression of what HC3 does is its flagship annual convening, the Hispanic NFL Draft Celebration. Launched in Detroit in 2024 in partnership with the National Football League, the multi-day event travels to the host city of each year's NFL Draft — Green Bay in 2025, Pittsburgh in April 2026. It is a business conference more than a fan event. Keynotes and panels cover sports marketing, cybersecurity, and the rise of Latinas in mainstream sports, delivered by NFL and media executives including Marissa Solis, the NFL's Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Consumer Marketing; Tomás Maldonado, the NFL's Chief Information Security Officer; and Nicole Peláez-Dandrea, ESPN's Vice President of Audience Engagement. Corporate sponsors have included PepsiCo, Lowe's, Travel & Leisure, Rocket Mortgage, and Rate. The event does exactly what Arbelaez's method describes: it puts Hispanic corporate executives in a room that would not previously have convened them, and it uses the NFL's platform to give the work visibility no council could generate on its own.
"I'm a big believer in the idea of being in the right room."
That is the whole thesis of HC3. Bring the right people into the right room, at the right moment in their careers, and the room does part of the work. The other part is the discipline of leaving the door open behind you.
HC3 today offers professional development programs, networking convenings, and thought-leadership discussions for Hispanic executives across the United States. The organization is measured, in Arbelaez's terms, by two metrics: how many Hispanic executives are now in rooms they were not previously in, and how many of those executives have already turned around to bring the next one along.
THE TAKEAWAY
The pattern that runs through Arbelaez's career is not networking. It is the handoff — a method built to ensure that access, once earned, is transferred to the next person waiting behind.
- He handed off his fraternity presidency into a template for community leadership at the Hispanic Business Alliance in Detroit.
- He handed off the HBA model — Fiesta Tigres, Hispanic Night with the Pistons — into a philosophy of visibility as a public good, not a personal asset.
- He handed off HITEC's founding room — Fortune 1000 CIOs and CTOs of Hispanic heritage — into HC3, an institution built to extend the same discipline across every C-suite function and, in partnership with the NFL, onto some of the largest platforms in American professional sports.
That is the architecture of a career designed to outlast its author. Not the accumulation of rooms one has been in — but the discipline of walking someone else into each of them.
Sources & Citations
- Executive career — senior roles at Covisint LLC, T-Systems, Softtek USA (Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer), Globant, and Amazon Web Services (Principal Global Account Executive); HITEC founding-member status in 2007 and presidency beginning 2011; current chairmanship of the Advisory Board for the Information and Decision Sciences Department at Oakland University; and Director service with the Michigan Council of Women in Technology Foundation — are drawn from interview with the subject, spring 2026, and cross-referenced with public company and organizational listings.
- The Technology Diversity Guru designation was published by Latino Leaders magazine during Arbelaez's tenure at HITEC.
- Hispanic NFL Draft Celebration host cities (Detroit 2024, Green Bay 2025, Pittsburgh April 22, 2026), participating NFL and media executives (Marissa Solis, SVP Global Brand and Consumer Marketing; Tomás Maldonado, Chief Information Security Officer; Nicole Peláez-Dandrea, ESPN Vice President of Audience Engagement), and corporate sponsors (PepsiCo, Lowe's, Travel & Leisure, Rocket Mortgage, Rate) are drawn from HC3's public event record and cross-referenced with the National Football League's and ESPN's organizational listings.
- The 2018 Maestro Award in Leadership is drawn from the awarding organization's public record.
- Career biography, direct quotations, and account of the Pushing Up and Pulling Up method are drawn from interview with the subject, spring 2026.
Featured Subject & Practice
Andre Arbelaez is President and CEO of the Hispanic C-Suite Corporate Council (HC3). He previously led the Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC), which he joined at its 2007 founding, and held senior roles at Amazon Web Services, Globant, Softtek USA (SVP and Chief Strategy Officer), T-Systems, and Covisint LLC. He speaks on technology, diversity, and smart cities — with addresses at the White House, United Nations Headquarters, and across Silicon Valley. Latino Leaders has called him the Technology Diversity Guru. Colombian by heritage and Detroit-born.
Board service. Chairman, Advisory Board of the Information and Decision Sciences Department at Oakland University; Director, Michigan Council of Women in Technology Foundation (MCWT); Board of Directors, iWorker Innovations.
Recognition. 2018 Maestro Award in Leadership.
HC3 advances Hispanic C-suite leadership through professional development, executive convenings, and thought-leadership discussions. Its flagship annual event, the Hispanic NFL Draft Celebration, has run in Detroit (2024, inaugural), Green Bay (2025), and Pittsburgh (April 22, 2026), with the NFL and corporate sponsors PepsiCo, Lowe's, Travel & Leisure, Rocket Mortgage, and Rate.
Connect & Follow the Practice:
- Andre Arbelaez: Connect on LinkedIn.
- HC3: Visit hc3global.com for programming, membership, and upcoming convenings.
Reported and written by Rafael Magaña, Founder & Publisher, for Latino Professionals Magazine. → Full archive
RECORD №00101 · MMXXVI · Latino Professionals Magazine
Published by Latino Professionals Media Group.
Documenting the people, ideas, and institutions shaping American business.
