Ms. Sumithra Gomatam brings over three decades of industry experience building, scaling and nurturing several high-performing businesses across IT and BPO services. She is currently part of Goldman Sachs value accelerator program and serves as Executive Chairperson on two of their investments - Omega HMS and Apexon. She has held this responsibility for the past four years.
In addition, Ms. Sumithra is an advisory council member of L&T Edutech and an Independent Director at Wheels India Ltd.
A Cognizant veteran of 24 years, Ms. Sumithra has held multiple strategic leadership roles in the company across industries, service lines and geographies. She was a member of the company’s global Executive Committee responsible for shaping the company’s strategy, operations and culture.
Ms. Sumithra started out playing delivery roles in the Banking and Financial Services practice (1998 to 2005), setting up development centers for business application services and transformation. This included a client management stint in California.
She then went on to build out Cognizant’s Quality Engineering and Assurance business as an industry leading business globally. She grew this practice organically from 800 to 30,000 employees in eight years (2005 to 2013) during which time revenues grew from $20 million to over $1.5 billion with profits significantly higher than company average. Over years, Ms. Sumithra took global leadership for this business expanding into several new markets, building strong client communities through unique Testing Summits and developing a strong pipeline of talent through collaboration with universities across the globe.
Later, Ms. Sumithra assumed broader responsibility of global delivery for multiple industries - manufacturing, retail, consumer goods, financial services, insurance, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and media and entertainment - and was the global leader for Communications and Technology business from 2013 till 2016. In this role, she built a strong Systems Integration practice to integrate off-the-shelf industry products in client environments and fostered an environment of cross-vertical collaboration. During this period, she was responsible for over 100,000 employees in India rolling up to her.
In 2015, Ms. Sumithra took on delivery of business process services as an additional responsibility and became the President of Digital Operations from Aug 2016 to grow and mature the service line leveraging technology. Digital Operations today is approaching $2 billion with strong growth in new services from born-digital technology clients in the Silicon Valley, Intelligent Process Automation and Platform-based services.
For the past 15 years Ms. Sumithra has been playing global roles driving business strategy, market share and mind share with clients along with talent strategy and operational excellence helping scale businesses across IT and Business Services. She has deep client relationships across the C-suite (CIO, COO, CEO and CFO organizations).
Ms. Sumithra was recognized as one of the “Most Powerful Women in Indian business” by Business Today in 2013. She was part of the NASSCOM BPM Leadership Council.
Before joining Cognizant, Ms. Sumithra worked in TCS on product development and IT transformation projects. She started her career as a telecom R&D engineer with HTL.
Ms. Sumithra earned her B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Anna University and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.
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