Director, IT Strategy Consulting, Cloud

Who we are

Gartner's Consulting business is an extension of Gartner's industry-leading IT Research. From CIOs to leaders in business and government, we help Gartner clients across enterprises translate insights into transformational actions and achieve their mission-critical priorities. Leveraging the breadth of Gartner's resources, Consulting is growing rapidly, with unlimited potential to continue expanding our client base.

What we do

Technology Strategy Consulting. We help the C-suite make the right decisions based on how technology can transform their businesses. In today's world, a consulting firm that is "born digital" (with the ability to directly leverage the full power of Gartner's research and insights) has relevance to the most important strategic decisions any business will make.

We deliver value to clients in areas such as IT Strategy Consulting, Benchmarking, Analytics, and Optimization. Typically, this helps Gartner's clients to execute on their strategic priorities, across all sectors, including but not limited to:

• Cloud Strategy
• Digital Acceleration and Transformation
• Enterprise Enablement
• Big Data and Analytics
• Applications Rationalization
• Sourcing and Ecosystem Optimization
• Contract and Cost Optimization
• Security and Risk Management

What you'll do

Our Directors are responsible for high-level project delivery and oversight along with client relationship management. You will manage teams and advise clients at the highest strategic level on both big-picture and tactical matters, focusing on how technology enables a wide range of business outcomes. This position is for a Director focused on cloud and Infrastructure areas supporting Gartner Consulting businesses and clients in North America.

More specifically, you will be:

• Leading project teams and project/engagement planning and management for complex full-lifecycle global cloud and infrastructure, being responsible for:
• Managing complex engagements, potentially simultaneously, including timeline, budget and people
• Drive delivery of high-quality deliverables, in accordance with client expectations and predetermined timelines and budgets
• Developing verbal and written project communications to client project teams and senior executives
• Monitoring and addressing project risk mitigation activities to ensure risks are satisfactorily addressed
• Planning and facilitating critical meetings with the client's project team(s) as needed
• Ensuring client receives status updates and identified problems are solved
• Monitoring clients' expectations and partnering with senior team members to revise project scope when appropriate
• Anticipating and addressing customer service requirements
• Provide upward feedback to more senior team members, when relevant
• Providing thought leadership, delivery excellence and people leadership within one's area of expertise by performing the following activities:
• Contributing expertise/insight to the delivery of solutions, to support NA practice leaders with practice strategy and thought leadership
• Keeping current on technologies/trends in one's area of expertise domain
• Proactively sharing knowledge within and outside of the engagement setting creating broader impact on India consulting business (beyond immediate client delivery responsibilities)
• Harvest intellectual capital from own engagements and share with industry/ practice experts
• Perform QA of critical project deliverables to ensure quality and timeliness of India consulting associate deliverables to regional project teams
• Contributing to business-building activities, including:
• Partnering with subject matter experts and managing partners to develop long-term client relationships during and outside of an engagement leading to repeat/new business opportunities
• Contributing to the (1) development of proposals; (2) scoping and qualifying opportunities and (3) assisting with identifying optimal client solutions by communicating the Gartner value proposition
• Participating and actively supporting recruiting efforts to help the business grow
• Leading and managing associates as required, by onboarding new associates, coaching and developing junior associates to build industry, practice practice-specific knowledge. This might also include formal mentoring responsibilities along with annual performance evaluation

What you'll need

• Excellent understanding of Public Cloud offerings from large Hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and major building blocks of a Private Cloud environment including Cloud Access Layer (IDAM, IGA, PAM etc.), Cloud orchestration and automation, Metering/Chargeback, Cloud Infra resource pool etc.
• Prior experience as Cloud Architect or System Engineer
• 8-12 years of overall experience, preferably in Tier 1/ well-known management consulting firms with project delivery and sales experience
• Experience of delivering Strategy engagements and recommending actionable insights to clients
• Experience working with global teams on complex IT infrastructure projects i.e. data center transformation, network and cloud strategy formulation, system and network implementation
• Experience evaluating "best fit" Cloud Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and Cloud Deployment Model (Private, Public, Hybrid) to meet client needs and objectives
• Experience with Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud strategies by taking into consideration offerings from large Hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and SIs around Compute, Storage and Back-Up, Network and Security, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
• Comfortable in developing high-level technical solutions, future state architectures on Cloud and Data Center Transformation, and conducting detailed options analysis to support business cases.
• Data Center Modernization skills including, but not limited to: Data Center Facilities modernization, Data Center Migration, Data Center colocation, Data Center Consolidation, Data Center core networking concepts, etc.
• Familiarity with CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) concepts
• Familiarity with Cloud Service Broker (CSB) concepts
• Capable of defining multi-cloud strategy, interoperability and architecture to establish a multi-cloud ecosystem
• Execution experience of multiple end-to-end cloud migrations from foundational setup to workload deployment in a production cloud environment
• Able to define cloud migration architecture blueprints and best practices through the migration lifecycle
• Experience in estimating cloud costs across services, cloud performance engineering and optimizing cloud costs
• Relevant cloud-native or third-party tooling experience to assess cloud configurations, and identify service optimizations
• Impactful client presentation capabilities, strong problem-solving skills and story-telling techniques.
• Excellent communication, presentation and facilitation skills (ideally in critical political environments)
• A consistent track record of leading people and building high-performing teams that leverage Technology to drive the mission-critical priorities of commercial or government entities
• An ability to inspire and motivate professionals from both technical and non-technical backgrounds towards a common goal
• An unwavering commitment to the success of your team, and willingness to provide constructive/ corrective action when needed

Good to have technology experience:

• Awareness of various topics such as security frameworks, MDR, EDR, GDPR and other compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Familiarity with architecture best practices and frameworks such as TOGAF, ITIL etc.
• Prior experience in a problem-solving capacity such as a solution/technical architect or analyst preferred
• Experience developing a business case for setting up private, public or hybrid cloud environments
• Ability to synthesize and translate complex technical aspects into business terms and define from business objectives and constraints complex technical solutions
• Experience within a well-regarded management consultancy in a project delivery capacity
• Experience with automation and orchestration tools such as: Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, PowerShell, etc.
• Experience with one or more of VMware vRealize Operations, Openshift, VMWare Tanzu, Google Anthos, or other similar products.
• Experience with VMware Cloud Foundations, Azure VMware services, VMware Cloud on AWS, etc.
• Experience with Application performance management (APM) tools (e.g., AppDynamics, New Relic, Dynatrace, etc.)
• Experience with container and container management technologies (e.g., Docker Kubernaties, etc)
• Familiarity with micro-segmentation technology approaches
• Familiarity with Microservices, Serverless, and Service Mesh technologies
• Ability to advise on cloud infrastructure, platforms and applications
• An ability to be hands-on and to manage multiple client priorities simultaneously
• An Engineering or Computer Science degree, with preferably an MBA

Who you are:

• Self-starter and a quick learner, demonstrates a no-limits mindset
• Strong consultative skills and problem-solving abilities and strong desire to win
• Passionate about technology and helping clients in the time of industry disruption led by technology evolution. Tracks the latest trends and potential use of technology to solve complex business problems
• Leadership to drive great results through a team of talented but junior consultants, motivate and help them grow
• High-performing team player with strong intercultural communication and collaboration
• Ability to influence and build trust-based, value-added relationships with senior executives, both internally and externally
• A curious and inquisitive mind, with an openness to new experiences and learning, strong problem-solving ability, and client focus
• Proven track record for achieving and exceeding personal targets like sales, utilization, manager revenue etc.
• Navigating through unstructured and sometimes not very clear environment