A rapid career path
Chowdhury’s background seems perfectly tailored for a leadership role at an innovative communications firm. Having earned an engineering degree with an emphasis on telecommunications, he studied several U.S. firms as a part of a Ph.D. program. “I went out and spent some time in some of the telcos,” he remembers, “understanding their problems and looking at their corporate planning.”
After completing his studies, Chowdhury joined San Francisco Consulting Group, which was later acquired by KPMG. “We were a group of telecom consulting professionals,” he explains, “and I joined because the focus of my Ph.D. was so pertinent to the industry. I worked across four continents in my first three years of working there.
“After three years I landed in Australia,” he continues, “and I became a partner (MD) two years later.” The consulting arm of KPMG spun off to become BearingPoint at about this time, and Chowdhury advanced across several roles to finally become the interim country leader of BearingPoint Australia, while it fought governance issues with the previous CEO. “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,” Chowdhury recalls. This experience has helped in managing more than 2,500 resources in Chowdhury’s current IT team.
A balanced life
While his educational and work background made him the ideal CIO of a major communications company, Chowdhury’s extracurricular interests helped to make him the perfect fit for an innovative firm like RCOM. He’s an avid musician and has participated in and led several musical groups over the years. “I’m schooled in Indian music and play the keyboard and the accordion,” he notes.
“I also do abstract figurative painting," he continues. “I have a goal to have my own personal exhibition in three to four years’ time. I can do about five or six largish paintings a year.” Chowdhury’s participation in the arts connects him in another way with the younger generation of Indian consumers, many of whom are themselves involved in creative avocations.
These pursuits, along with a regular meditation practice and running in marathons, bring a balance to Chowdhury’s life that in many ways has enabled his success. “I learned as a young man that the meaning of my name, Sumit, is ‘well balanced’. This knowledge has had a great influence on my life.”
Maintaining availability for diverse customers
This balance is important, as Chowdhury’s CIO role actually encompasses two business units: telecommunications and IT services. “I am the CIO on one side,” he explains, “and I have outsourced everything to my other side in IT services.” The group also provides IT and data center services for a number of large firms and for other Reliance business units.
The IT services role makes Chowdhury’s job more complex than the typical CIO’s. “Not only do I have to keep our systems highly available for our consumers,” he notes, “but I also have Service Level Agreements with each of our enterprise IT services customers. Ninety percent of our revenue comes from a number of business-critical processes that must be available 24 hours a day.”