Gartner Expert

Sundar Viswanathan

Sr Director Analyst

Sundar Viswanathan is a Senior Director Analyst at Gartner in the IT Leaders Sourcing, Procurement and Vendor Management team with over 25 years of experience in the IT Industry. Sundar guides Gartner clients in sourcing applications services (including consulting, implementation, development, testing and support). He specializes in globalization and sourcing strategy, including onshore vs offshore locations strategy, provider selection, RFP management, pricing, contracting and negotiation best practices, ERP, CRM, HCM and SaaS implementation service providers, application / legacy modernization and vendor go-to-market strategy validation.

Previous experience

Prior to Gartner, Sundar was the Head of Emerging Technologies & Innovation and CTO for Public Sector industry vertical at Fujitsu Oceania, responsible for enabling public sector organizations to deliver transformative citizen experiences leveraging emerging technologies (specifically IoT and AI). In a career spanning over three decades, Sundar delivered IT globalization and sourcing advisory for Fortune 500 companies (across manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, industrial engineering verticals), developed competitive go to market offerings and strategy for IT services portfolio, led the IT sourcing strategy and IT vendor management for Supervalu and program managed TESCOs Oracle Retail implementation and IT applications support for a portfolio of business applications.

Professional background

Fujitsu, CTO for Public Sector and Head of Emerging Technologies, 5 years

Supervalu, Strategic Sourcing, vendor management, Global IT Shared Services strategy , 2 years

Tech Mahindra, Multiple across 2 stints (Delivery to Go-To-Market), Head of IES ANZ, 7 years

TESCO, IT applications support portfolio management (Application Services), Sourcing Tr, 4 years

Zinnov Management Consulting, Globalisation & Sourcing advisory, Vendor assessment, IT Shared Service Centers, 5 years

Areas of coverage
  • IT Contracts Negotiations

  • IT Vendor Portfolio Management

  • Technology Innovation and Strategy Leadership

  • IT Sourcing, Procurement and Vendor Management Operating Model

  • IT Sourcing Strategy Development and Execution

Education

Post-graduate qualification

Certificate in Retail Management & Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and TESCO

Certificate in Business Management & Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, India

Bachelor of Engineering & Computer Science Engineering, Bharathiar University, India

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Top Issues That I Help Clients Address

01

How to develop and execute sourcing strategy (insourcing/outsourcing/offshoring) for IT applications solutions and services?

02

How to develop and execute sourcing strategy (insourcing/outsourcing/offshoring) for Data and Analytics and AI services?

03

Best practices in selecting, contracting and managing ERP, CRM and HCM implementation and support service providers / system integrators (On-prem and SaaS)

04

Best practices in selecting SaaS solution implementation providers and ongoing support for SaaS based business applications

05

Best practices in contracting, establishing and managing SLAs and penalties, governance and innovation for application services