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HCL America

April 2007 - April - 2015

The Green Years

Onsite Service Delivery Manager, Program Director

Oct 2014 – Apr 2015: Project Manager, The Enthusiasts Network, El Segundo, CA                                                                      

Responsibilities:

  • Responsible for project delivery with shared project teams located in a Global Delivery model, with teams spread across New York, California, and India.

  • Responsibilities included project status reporting to client team on project progress, risks, issues, project spend, estimate to complete, cost management, cost and schedule variances, resource management, and reporting financial performance measures of the project.

  • In-depth analysis and reporting of the project cost - revenue and capital allocation, project actual charges against actual hours charged, and allocated project budget; including vendor billing reconciliation and accounting remediation.

Key activities/projects:

Data Center migration, setup, and testing of disaster recovery center

VDI rollout and maintenance to end-users

Auditing, reconciliation, and remediation of Customer’s Service Provider network availability and billing

 

Jul 2010 – Oct 2014: Exide Technologies, Milton, GA                                                                             

Responsibilities:

  • Responsible for (creation) and delivery of IT infrastructure and middleware services; Create and maintain program/project portfolio;  Manage operations CSAT for the overall engagement.

  • Planning and coordinating project schedules with IT departments, vendors, and business contacts.

  • Run operations and projects. Providing personal and group leadership in identifying, proposing, and defining new approaches and solutions.

  • Conduct and manage operations and project review meetings, technical workshops, and stakeholder meetings;  Conduct Daily, Weekly (Operations/Projects review), Monthly (Steering), and Quarterly Business Review meetings with all Key Stakeholders; Report Operations/Projects metrics such as performance and progress metrics, SLAs and track action items.

  • Manage Capital and Operating expenses spending within or below budget; Control and manage vendor contracts, change requests, and payments.

  • Support businesses and business users in their requirements and within their time frames; Participation in the definition of Statements of Work for the project and ongoing support activities.

Key activities/projects:

  • Design proper SLA metrics for each contract (SOW); define data, calculations, and processes to achieve SLAs, finalize and automate reports and dashboards.

  • Design and implement customized solutions in Private and Hybrid clouds; Exposure to PaaS services  (JDE OneWorld); Successfully implementing a comprehensive project management system and dashboard tracker.

  • Design and deploy Hyper-V/ESX hosts and provisioning VM clients on demand.

  • Design and deploy SharePoint portals for content/record management, collaboration, and blogs - Knowledge management/content management solution (on SharePoint) project.

  • Perform gap analysis, design, and propose new enterprise backup/recovery solutions.

  • Design, proof of concept, and implementation of backup and storage systems (migration from TSM to NetBackup).

  • CA server backup solution design, testing & implementation project.

  • OCS federation setup between multiple forests.

  • Synchronize various databases within a domain – such as BBCA, ePO, and Active Directory databases.

  • Win XP to Win 7 enterprise testing (using ADK) and migration project.

  • Testing and upgrading Microsoft Servers from version 2008 R2 to 2012 R2.

  • NA & EU Exchange Server upgrade from SP1 to SP3 project.

  • Implement a monthly technical customer satisfaction survey and generating service improvement programs from the feedback

 

Jan 2011 – Sep 2011; Jul 2013 – Oct 2014: Caraustar Inc., Austell, GA                                                                      

Responsibilities:

  • Support businesses and business users in their requirements and within their time frames; Participation in the definition of Statements of Work for the project and ongoing support activities; Implement an IT Governance framework and process.

  • Review contracts, interpret existing metrics, and conduct a gap analysis. Design proper SLA metrics for applicable tasks in each contract (SOW), define calculations and processes to achieve SLAs and finalize reporting and dashboards.

  • Hands-on management of Problem and Change management – correcting and customizing processes and workflows.

  • Develop proof-of-concept for deploying Hyper Visors in the enterprise; Compare costs, virtualization benefits, server stability, virtual machine clusters/backup/restore.

  • Deploy ESX (production) and Hyper-V hosts (general use); Run periodic checks to ensure all virtual systems are performing as desired; take preventive measures to ensure the proper configuration is maintained.

  • Complete annual disaster recovery drills.

  • Manage resources (onsite/offshore) and measure individual performance; Identifying required resource requirements & recruitment of qualified external resources for project; Identifying required resources for the transition of solutions to steady-state.

Key activities/projects:

  • Perform capacity assessment of Caraustar Physical Datacenter servers which are proposed for Virtualization on VMware vSphere ESX 4.0 by following the VMware best practices.

  • Assess the environment and provide a solution for a desktop virtualization strategy leveraging VMware View.

  • Scrutinize and clean up current Active Directory; Active Directory upgrades to Server 2008 R2.

  • Re-Architect Active Directory Domain Services for improving performance, grouping, and policy rollouts; AD Integration with Service Now

  • Get off using web VPN concentrators and move to new firewalls.

  • Implement DFS server cluster and enable DNS replication creation.

  • Provide Proof Of Concept for a Riverbed/Granite web optimization solution.

  • Production Storage SAN cleanup project; ExaGrid maintenance and support project.

  • Retention of Backup Policy statement generation; Validate that each server is getting backed up.

  • Disaster Recovery Planning, testing and conducting; coordinating with multiple vendors and service providers.

 

Jun 2009 – Jul 2010: Reynolds Packaging Group Richmond, VA                                                     

Responsibilities:

  • Designing Cluster failover, Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with Data Center hosted in SunGard centers in Alpharetta (main production center) and Carlstadt (secondary DR & QA/Development center).

  • Work closely with customers to plan, design, and deploy a multi-tiered backup strategy.

  • Creation & deployment of systems and processes to ensure effective measuring, monitoring, and managing of day-to-day operations (and performance metrics).

  • Responsible for creation and completion of Get-Well plans, Service Improvement Programs and CMM/ITIL Process audits.

Key activities/projects:

  • Designing a Cluster-based model based on HP servers for hosting Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Financials, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, i-procurement, Advanced Planning & Scheduling EBS as the main modules.

  • Supervised complete lifecycle management of Oracle Applications; monitoring performance during critical business hours and days, Concurrent Program activity, network performance of tools such as SQLserver, Jetforms, ClearOrbit, XML monitor & RFUI, periodic cloning of Patch, Development, Testing and QA Environments from Production, and setting up and monitoring RMAN for database backups.

  • Monitored and managed Business Continuity Volumes, MirrorView copies, and SnapView snapshots in the two 150 TB EMC Clariion SANs.

  • Worked closely with the team to shape and define automation opportunities in UNIX/Windows – cluster fail-over scripts, mounting/dismounting of file systems and volumes, etc.

  • Managed a team of security administrators who provided support for McAfee Security appliances, SAS servers, ISA proxy servers, and Symantec servers, and endpoint security.

 

PRINCIPAL

January 2009 – May 2009: Telecom Billing project; Control Point Solutions, New Jersey

Control Point Solutions is a BPO specializing in providing Telecom billing control and optimization – they work with enterprise customers to analyze voice, data, and VOIP plans, monthly billing, and offer solutions to cut down telecom costs and better manage telecom equipment, lines, and bandwidth, I assisted their development team in defining local and wholesale trading interfaces with service providers (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) and designing the EDI transactions required for extracting CSRs (Customer Service Records). I also prepared a blueprint for putting together an extended Erlang analyzer and calculator to determine call density, lines required and usage, and feasibility of line conversions based on bandwidth consumption.  

 

October 2008 – December 2008: BPM Knowledge Transfer project; Thomson Reuters, New York

Thomson Reuters was seeking business analysts from HCL with experience in business process and rules modeling and documentation. These analysts will migrate the Demand Center activities from Rockville to a new group in Manila. Subsequently, the analysts will assist Thomson Reuters by monitoring progress until a steady state is reached in Manila. I led a team that built the winning proposal.

 

July 2008 – October 2008: Service Desk RFP preparation; World Bank, Washington DC

World Bank proposed to outsource their entire Service Desk operations to an offshore vendor with the intention of bringing down expenses and cutting operating costs as well as to get best-of-the-breed innovative solutions. Some of the work involved the study and analysis of requirements, the study of current Service Desk operations and their SLAs. World Bank required services were defined and categorized, and a delivery team was aligned to assist in building a proposal that included alternate solutions, case studies, and collaterals.

 

March 2008 – August 2008: JV proposal between HCL and Marco Polo Transport Services; Marco Polo Network, New York

Marco Polo Network (MPN) is a leading provider of order management systems and had the required pipeline between national, international stock exchanges and traders/brokers. MPN proposed to join hands with HCL in a Joint Venture program with its subsidiary Marco Polo Transport Services (MPTS) for providing hosting and SaaS services (to the extent HCL provides infrastructure and management of hardware and applications) in the emerging third world and other markets. I contributed substantially in the assessments, feasibility studies and commercials, and in the preparation and presentation of a SWOT report to the HCL management as feedback and data for moving forward.

 

April 2008 – July 2008: Market Data Infrastructure Review consultation project; E*Trade, New York

E*TRADE Securities is a global leader in online trading. With over 20 years of experience providing online trading solutions, E*TRADE Securities is recognized worldwide for its superior service, cutting-edge trading platforms, and competitive commissions. The current challenges in Market Data Systems that E*Trade faced included:

  • Increasing take-up of Direct Market Access, Smart Order Routing, Black Box and Algorithmic Trading approaches.

  • Dramatically increasing trading volumes and volatility across asset classes driven in part by increasing use of quantitative and algorithmic trading techniques.

  • Demanding customer expectations regarding more sophisticated trading tools, faster trading speeds, and lower explicit and implicit trading costs.

  • Proliferating technologies designed to increase trading speeds and to facilitate increasing trading and market data volumes at lower costs.

 

A very detailed report was prepared and shared with E*Trade outlining and recommending what steps E*Trade could take to avoid network bottlenecks and data jams in the coming years.

 

December 2007 – July 2008: Enterprise Product Support project; Travelers, Inc., Hartford

Travelers, a Hartford-based insurance giant, is the 2nd largest writer of commercial U.S. property-casualty insurance, 2nd largest writer of U.S. personal insurance through independent agents, 89 on the Fortune 500 list of largest U.S. Companies, 33,000 employees with revenues of over $25 Billion.  Travelers were interested to outsource the following tracks:

  • TSC: Technology Support Center is Travelers infrastructure and application helpdesk that provides support to Travelers employees, contractors, and subsidiaries of Travelers via telephone and a self-initiated ticketing system. 

  • ECC: Enterprise Command Center provides overall day-to-day technical, infrastructure, and application support for Travelers.  This support includes Mainframe, Distributed, Data and Voice Networks as well as enterprise monitoring, batch, and escalation support for over 1000 applications.

  • DA: Data Administration area provides database support for Travelers including data modeling, access modeling, object creation, and support, database backup and recovery, database performance, and application SQL assistance.  Additionally, DA provides database system product interfacing with technology suppliers for applicable product releases, fixes, and problem resolution.

  • EPS: Enterprise Product Support services for Traveler’s developers on products such as FileNet, DocuCorp, Middleware, HP Testing Tools, etc.

 

Travelers had the following expectations from HCL:

  • Testing: Complete functional testing of any change to a product version or configuration; Stress, load, and DR testing of the solutions annually or with significant upgrades.

  • Software Upgrades: Plan, schedule, communicate, test, implement and support version or product upgrades; Familiarity with change processes (ITIL); Installation/packaging technologies (Tivoli), Infrastructure, and staging environments is crucial.

  • LOB Support: Consumer support including best practices; user or project provisioning/de-provisioning support; Familiarity with How to order, install, configure, and best practices on how to use; May include facilitating User Groups, online forums, etc.

  • Level 2 and 3 Support: Knowledge of processes and tooling used in level 1-3 support such as ITIL, HP Service Desk; May need some level of COTS product vendors and vendor processes to create and manage an incident as part of problem resolution.

  • Off Hour Support: Some products will need non-core hour support for types of incidence or implementing changes or supporting load or DR testing.

  • Assist users (Developers) in procurement, strategy, architecture, design, and run time of the products. 

 

I was part of the pre-sales team and helped prepare the solution.

 

June 2007 – February 2008: Global Operations Center project; CompuCredit, Atlanta

CompuCredit, a leading provider of credit cards and other financial services proposed to outsource their infrastructure management services, specifically those of L1 and L2 services. The proposal was to set up a low-cost Global Operations Center in India and have services delivered out of the center. I was part of the team that put together a winning proposal.

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