Mike Schumacher

Founder & CEO Lakeside Software

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Mike Schumacher founded Lakeside Software and leads it as Chief Executive Officer. Its SysTrack platform addresses a problem that grew quietly for two decades: enterprise IT could prove its servers were up while its employees could not get their work done. SysTrack instruments the endpoint itself, running around 1,400 sensors that collect roughly ten thousand data points every fifteen seconds from each device, so that an IT organisation can see the actual experience of the person in front of the machine — the slow application launch, the failing virtual desktop session, the memory pressure nobody reported — and act on it before a ticket is filed. Schumacher is an engineer rather than a salesman by formation: a Michigan master’s in information engineering, product development leadership at Cubix Corporation, network products engineering at Telebit, and standards work with ISO and ANSI. Lakeside describes more than twenty-five years in the field, run from Ann Arbor, Michigan with offices in Atlanta, Boston and London.

Career Highlights

• Founded Lakeside Software and leads it as Chief Executive Officer, over a span the company describes as more than twenty-five years in endpoint intelligence.
• Built SysTrack into a digital employee experience and endpoint observability platform running around 1,400 sensors, collecting roughly 10,000 data points every fifteen seconds per endpoint, with more than 220 built-in automations.
• Helped establish the digital employee experience category, shifting end-user computing measurement from infrastructure uptime to what the employee actually experiences.
• Named a leader in ISG’s Provider Lens evaluations for both Digital Employee Experience and AI-Enabled End-User Computing Solutions in 2026.
• Placed on TIME’s list of America’s Top WorkTech Companies in 2026.
• Launched SysTrack Reliability Engineering, pushing the platform from measuring problems into systematically preventing them.
• Contributed to technology standards work with the International Organization for Standardization and the American National Standards Institute.
• Previously served as director of software engineering at Cubix Corporation, running product development, after working as a network products engineer at Telebit Corporation.

Professional Journey

Schumacher took a master’s degree in information engineering at the University of Michigan and began his career in networking hardware and software, working as an engineer on network products at Telebit Corporation. He moved to Cubix Corporation as director of software engineering, where he was responsible for product development. Alongside that work he was involved in formal technology standards, working with both the International Organization for Standardization and the American National Standards Institute — an unusual line on an executive biography, and one that suggests where his instincts lie.

He founded Lakeside Software to attack a measurement gap. At the time, enterprise IT was instrumented from the data centre outward: server availability, network throughput, application uptime. All of it could be green while an employee’s workstation was unusable. The missing telemetry was at the endpoint, and it was missing because collecting it continuously at scale, across tens of thousands of machines, without degrading the machines themselves, is a hard engineering problem rather than a hard product idea.

SysTrack is Lakeside’s answer, and its design reflects an engineer’s priorities. It runs about 1,400 sensors per endpoint and samples roughly ten thousand data points every fifteen seconds, across physical machines, virtual desktop infrastructure and multiple operating systems. The volume is the point: at that resolution, patterns become visible that a ticketing system never surfaces, because most degradation never generates a ticket — people work around it. Lakeside reports customers cutting mean time to resolution by up to thirty per cent and reducing hardware and software spend by identifying what is genuinely under-used rather than guessing.

Over time the category grew up around the product. What Lakeside had been doing became known as digital employee experience management, and the company positioned itself at the centre of it. More recently the platform has moved from observation toward action, with over 220 built-in automations and the launch of SysTrack Reliability Engineering, which applies a reliability-engineering discipline — the practices site reliability engineers use for services — to the endpoint estate.

In 2026 the company was named a leader in ISG’s Provider Lens evaluations for both Digital Employee Experience and AI-Enabled End-User Computing Solutions, and appeared on TIME’s list of America’s Top WorkTech Companies. It operates from Ann Arbor with offices in Atlanta, Boston and London, with Schumacher still in the chief executive’s role at the company he started.

Education

University of Michigan

Master’s degree, Information Engineering