Rahul Arora
Mount Colah,NSW
Summary
With over 20 years of experience, successfully leading strategic delivery programs and developing robust capabilities to ensure the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and efficient customer engagements. Expertise extends to leading both onshore and offshore teams across multiple locations, specializing in cloud migration, platform engineering, application support, and run operations. Skilled in driving transformation to deliver cost-effective solutions and achieving customer satisfaction and service excellence targets. Building strong working relationships with internal and external stakeholders comes naturally. Equipped with strong problem-solving abilities, a willingness to learn, and excellent communication skills, ready to contribute to team success and achieve positive results. A strong leader and problem-solver, dedicated to streamlining operations, decreasing costs, and promoting organizational efficiency. Independent decision-making skills and sound judgment positively impact company success.
Overview
22
22
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Director
Wipro Australia Ltd
01.2024 - Current
- Lead ICT Delivery of a large public sector account and being a focal point for service delivery - accountable for ICT Delivery, transformation projects, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, Revenue Growth & Operating Margin
- Leading onshore and offshore teams of 350 resources across hybrid cloud support, program management, platform engineering and support, application support, demand management
- Improved people engagement by well planned people engagement plan which included activities to improve communication, skill matrix leading to learning opportunities, reward program and key talent program
- Drive innovations to improve customer experience at account level – setting up demand management process to reduce the demand aging to less than 30 days and build revenue pipeline of over $2M in current financial year
- Responsible for account P&L including account margins (profitability) and improved margins by 3% by arresting revenue leaks, optimizing pyramid and improving margin via transformation projects
- Improved the service delivery governance and contract adherence by 60% improvement in SLA performance, 90% reduction in service credit being paid as penalty, reducing all invoice aging to less than 60 days and by resolving long outstanding invoices of over 500K
- Improved customer c-suite engagement by stakeholder mapping, governance adherence and relationship building
- Led improvement to project feedback by 100% and recovery of NPS from detractors to promoters
- Leveraged professional networks and industry knowledge to strengthen client relationships.
- Spearheaded innovative approaches to resource allocation and strategic planning.
- Enabled Gen AI use cases for team productivity - MS copilots, Github copilots. Led the discussions on technology transformation like usage of AI, Microservices adoption, Serverless platform adoption.
Technical Account Manager
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
06.2022 - 12.2023
- Working as Technical Account Manager for leading bank, Energy & utilities, Telecom and Retail customers in New Zealand
- Always worked with keeping customer in the center to make AWS as resilient, scalable and cost optimized platform for customer business outcomes
- Acting as the centerpiece in enterprise support for providing advocacy and strategic technical guidance to help plan and build solutions using best practices, and proactively keeping customers’ AWS environments operationally healthy – Conducted Well Architected reviews, operational workshops and Cloud financial management workshops
- Crafting and executing strategies to drive customers’ adoption and use of AWS services
- Developing trusting relationships with customers, understanding their business needs and technical challenges while driving technical discussions regarding incidents, trade-offs, and risk management
- Consulting with a range of partners from developers through to C-suite executives and collaborating with AWS Solutions Architects, Business Developers, Professional Services Consultants, and Sales Account Managers for finding opportunities for customers to gain additional value from AWS
- Part of Cloud financial management TFC (technical field community) and delivered cloud cost optimization plans for customers, aspirant of security TFC and delivered security improvement programs for 5 key customers across ANZ
- Cost optimization – SAP environment cost optimized by ~20% for energy and utilities customer, Call centre platform cost optimized by ~15% for top telco in New Zealand, digital bank platform cost optimized by ~30% for leading Kiwi bank
- Successfully helped energy & utility customer migrate contact center from Genesis to Amazon Connect during acquisition
- Successfully conducted support planning workshops for customers in FSI, retail, energy & utilities and Telecom sectors to create annual account plans aligning customer business and IT priorities with AWS solutions
- Successfully helped leading New Zealand bank to develop monitoring strategy which involved running workshop with stakeholders from engineering, architecture, business and operations team
- Speaker in ANZ FinOps workshop to help AWS customer get started on FinOps journey – speaker on cloud cost forecasting and budgets
Delivery Director
Cognizant
09.2016 - 06.2022
- As Service Delivery director and Engagement delivery lead, I was responsible for leading the Cloud, infrastructure and Security practice delivery for ANZ region
- Lead the delivery engagements with geographically dispersed teams with over 300 resources for cloud migration programs across all hyper-scalers, cloud managed services, platform support teams, enable new competencies like DevSecOps, AIops, Agile etc across engagements
- Managed P&L of over 30M USD portfolio – responsible for forecast accuracy, billing, revenue backlog and cost margins
- Improved the cost margins by leveraging multiple cost levers like constant pyramid optimization, cultivating high margin digital skills projects, offshoring and strong resource billing cadence to arrest revenue leak
- Ensured that service delivery meets contractual obligations – SLA, billed head-count, project milestones, SLA penalties
- Established and maintained customer, team and business excellence cadence in assigned area of responsibility to manage large scale deliveries
- Collaborated with technology partners and other internal teams on technology initiatives throughout the duration of an implementation
- Hired and retained digital skills talent especially during cloud talent crunch time – worked on rotation, upskill, shared operating models to manage talent
- Created an inclusive team environment via Diversity and inclusion programs, employee town-hall, reward & recognition programs
- Successfully managed automation projects with target savings of 1M+ across projects in Asia Pacific.
- Lead the practice for over 100% revenue growth while meeting margin targets while working with partners, internal teams.
- Directed multi-year cloud migration project for a leading manufacturing customer in Australia which involved migration, setting up platform engineering and platform support teams post migration
- Setup of dedicated cloud managed service team for a retail customer to support key cloud platform supporting customer to transform from traditional ICT services to modern cloud services
- Converted traditional revenue to digital revenue to grow revenue by 100% - setup of DevOps teams in key banking & insurance customers
- Successfully steered completion of contact center transition for a major mining customer during COVID
- Boosted customer experience and led the implementation of agile practices in digital transformation projects in collaboration with Centre of Excellence (CoE), various practice within the organization
- Led global people development in teams across 6 countries with initiatives like skill mapping, rotation of responsibilities, programs to improve collaboration
Service Delivery Manager – Professional Services
Dell EMC - Hyperconverged & Converged Infra and Hybrid Cloud
01.2015 - 09.2016
- Led a team of solution architects in the professional services segment of VCE product & services
- Worked closely with cross-functional, multi-regional teams involving factory (manufacturing), product engineering and product support
- Ensured compliance with established policies, practices, and processes defined by VCE for delivering Converged and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure related services
- Engaged in identifying and resolving complex problems relating to product/service installation, update, configuration, operations, performance etc
- Worked closely with VCE lead partners in ensuring a successful services delivery engagement for the customer
- Pivotal in setting up the Quality Assurance team for Vblocks which Slashed build faults by over 30%
- Defined, Owned Service/Quality and Process Improvement plan
- Led the discovery of 10+ automation ideas by organizing Hackathons to drive build automation
- Functioned as an integrated solution speaker and represented business unit in partner events
Service Delivery Manager
Hewlett-Packard
09.2003 - 12.2014
- Functioned as an integral member of the Competency Center for HP Storage Product line, setting up, developing and training the in-house support team of 18 technical resources, and engaged in knowledge transfer
- Oversaw Incident Management & problem management function as the Go-to-person for a mission critical customer improving RCA timelines to under 15 days and helped improve MTTR to less than 4 Hrs
- Performed Trend analysis for recurring issues for Defect Prevention - helped identified top defects areas and enabled team to create knowledge articles for self help and faster resolution
- Continually identified ways to reduce cost of delivering the services and improve service - introduced peer review of critical changes to bring failed changes under 2% , knowledge management to reduce resolution time and lower employee pyramid.
- Functioned as Mission Critical Engineer, delivered timely solutions to customer issues and met the defined SLAs for response and resolution time and other performance metrics
- Handled escalations for Critical or Major Incidents
- Complete evaluation and present monthly reviews of operational performance to client measured in terms of SLA/SLO
- Pivotal in setting up the support team for software defined storage solutions
- Managed an automation project - Log Parser Project to reduce triage time by 80% for support engineers
- Strengthened cross-functional collaboration by leading initiatives like tech talk, career fairs, etc
Technical Support Engineer
vCustomer
12.2002 - 08.2003
- Providing technical assistance to users by troubleshooting and resolving hardware and software issues across computer systems, networks, and applications
- Creating and maintaining technical documentation, updating knowledge base articles with troubleshooting steps
- Answering technical queries from users via phone, email, or ticketing systems, providing clear instructions and guidance on resolving issues
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) - Customer Service Management
Symbiosis Center For Management And Human Resource Development
Bangalore01.2016
Bachelor in Technology - Computer Science
Punjab Technical University
Punjab07.2002
Skills
- Strategic Planning
- Key Account Management
- Solutions Architecture
- Managed Services
- Cloud Computing
- Service Delivery Management
- Digital Transformation
- Cost Optimization
- Customer Relationship Management
- Pre-Sales Support
- Technology Consulting
- People Management
- Stakeholder Management
- Budget control
- Process improvement
Certification
- AWS Solution architect associate
- AWS cloud practitioner
- Google cloud associate
- Azure cloud associate
- VCE - Converged Infrastructure Associate
- PMP
- SAFe – leading agile teams
- ITIL
- FinOps practitioner
- AI for project managers
Timeline
Director
Wipro Australia Ltd
01.2024 - Current
Technical Account Manager
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
06.2022 - 12.2023
Delivery Director
Cognizant
09.2016 - 06.2022
Service Delivery Manager – Professional Services
Dell EMC - Hyperconverged & Converged Infra and Hybrid Cloud
01.2015 - 09.2016
Service Delivery Manager
Hewlett-Packard
09.2003 - 12.2014
Technical Support Engineer
vCustomer
12.2002 - 08.2003
Master of Business Administration (MBA) - Customer Service Management
Symbiosis Center For Management And Human Resource Development
Bachelor in Technology - Computer Science
Punjab Technical University
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