A resilient leader

As a cost conscious leader, Sumit Chowdhury, CIO at RCOM and CEO of Reliance Tech Services, emphasizes on the importance of learning, which he believes never goes waste and always contributes to building a strong foundation. By Nivedan Prakash

Sumit Chowdhury, CIO at Reliance Communications and also CEO of Reliance Tech Services, is a man of great conviction. This is very much evident when we look at his both personal as well as professional life. At this very young age, he has been able to create a niche for himself and has set such a trend that many industry leaders look up to him as and when required.

Education has played a big role in Chowdhury’s life, as he rightly points out that each course of study has added a new dimension to his broad experience. After completing his primary through high school from Loyola School in Jamshedpur, he chose the engineering stream and got admission in IIT, Kanpur where he completed his B-Tech in Electrical and Electronics.

Chowdhury later on moved to the US and earned a M.S. in Electronics and Communications Engineering and a Ph.D. in Management and Information Systems at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg. Chowdhury always had the hunger to learn more and more. And that’s why, as a part of the Ph.D. program, he also studied several U.S. firms, wherein he went out and spent time in some of the telecos, understanding their problems and looking at their corporate planning.

Finally, Chowdhury received training and a diploma at the Australian Institute of Company Directors, wherein he has done the board certification program for being on boards of companies. While pursuing his academic degrees, he has also managed to complete eight years of music studies, with a certification to teach, and six years of art, which has helped him to attain the balance necessary to successfully navigate a rapidly growing and changing career.

On road to a successful career

Before enrolling for the M.S. course, Chowdhury worked briefly for Philips India as a Project Engineer. And during his study period at Carnegie Mellon University, he also worked as a Research and Teaching Assistant for around four years.

And from thereon, he never looked back. After completing his studies, Chowdhury joined San Francisco Consulting Group, which was later acquired by KPMG. “We were a group of telecom consulting professionals. I worked across four continents in my first three years of working there,” stated Chowdhury.

He then moved on to Australia and after two years, became a partner (MD). Later on, the consulting arm of KPMG spun off to become BearingPoint and after working in several roles, Chowdhury became the interim country leader of BearingPoint Australia.

Chowdhury highlighted, “The leadership role gave me exposure to sectors I had not been involved with before, such as financial services and government, and also the opportunity to manage a professional services company.”

Present job profile

Since January 2006, Chowdhury is working as the CIO of Reliance Communications. And since April 2008, he is working as the CEO of Reliance Tech Services. Reliance Tech Services is the Consulting, IT and Managed Services company of Reliance ADA Group. It specializes in helping customers manage all aspects of technology. It takes on end-to-end turnkey projects that require scale and complexity.

Chowdhury’s CIO role actually encompasses two business units – telecommunications and IT services. “I am the CIO on one side and I have outsourced everything to my other side in IT services,” points out Chowdhury. The group also provides IT and data center services for a number of large firms and for other Reliance business units.

In his role, Chowdhury has been able to build a highly effective IT organization. He decided to convert the team from being an internal cost-center into a profit center and make people like a service provider to the business.

“So, we are now a separate IT company and we have to service the business just like any other external company would like to service. We have become a lot more customer centric and we have to be cost-effective otherwise the job will be given away to somebody else. Everybody now works as if they are working for an IT organization with an outsourced contract. Now, we don’t have an internal company relationship. We have a proper contract with the business to deliver. We have become more efficient with service levels and cost advantages because we have converted ourselves from being an internal siloed company into a proper shared services and profit center,” explained Chowdhury.

Noteworthy deployments

Some of the recent noteworthy deployments that have taken place under Chowdhury’s supervision include organization wide self-service capabilities across multiple channels for the customers, significant customer analytics and profiling technologies, introduced many new back-end technologies that impact how they operate their environment very effectively and that too in a cost-effective manner.

He has also introduced data replication technology, data storage and retrieval technologies which have made the whole environment very efficient. And these initiatives are helping the organization reduce its cost to service the customers.

One of the key systems for RCOM is eRecharge, which enables consumers on prepaid phone plans to add minutes to their account online. A few years ago, the application was running on a single enterprise-level server, thus representing a single point of failure. To mitigate this risk, the IT team chose a Symantec high availability solution to deploy eRecharge to a one-to-one, active-active cluster on two Sun servers.

Moreover, giving his thoughts on the technologies that are going to transform the way the job of a CIO works, Chowdhury highlights that there are two types of CIOs. There are ones who manage their whole team and deliver to the business requirement and on the other hand, there are CIOs who have outsourced most of their work to the outside parties. While the latter ones will look at cost effectiveness and keep on working with the third party, for the former ones who manage their own team and their own infrastructure, there are going to be a lot more technologies that might help in transforming their work.

Meanwhile, Chowdhury is evaluating lots of technologies for future like different security, virtualization and infrastructure optimization technologies. He is also looking at various data center technologies.

Looking forward

Chowdhury feels that the year 2010 would be a great year for the industry. With the market opening up and businesses already beginning to spend, the market will see demand for lot of services picking up again and as a leader, he has to right there to service those demands. “In the telecom industry, the cost of everything has become so low that we have to be cost-effective. We have to continue to drive cost and in order to drive cost out in IT, you have to be very particular about what you are spending. So, prioritization of work is going very important,” added Chowdhury.

In future, he wants to lead a more efficient and innovative IT team and service the business needs very quickly and too in a very cost effective and timely manner.

In his message to the aspiring leaders of the industry, Chowdhury points out that a CIO’s job is a very interesting job where he has to take a lot of responsibilities without getting all the benefits out of it. A CIO has to know how to be resilient to keep doing something where somebody else would always take the credits for all the efforts that he has put in.

IT being a cost center, a CIO has to know how to keep on giving back to the business a lot more than he gets in return. It’s a very spiritual experience being a CIO. CIOs need to be the leaders and motive people to innovate and produce goods that business will require in the future.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com