Cable and Wireless PLC (C&W) will hire at least 100 extra staff in Bangalore to keep pace with demand for its network services from customers around the world, a company executive said Wednesday.
The staff will be added during this year and will also allow C&W to roll out some new types of services, said Raj Metrani, director of the Indian operations of C&W, a communications service provider based in London. He would not say what new services C&W plans to offer.
C&W already employs about 170 operations staff at its India Center of Excellence (ICE) in Bangalore, where it offers services including remote network monitoring and management, network design and implementation and network security services. The ICE also manages the communications infrastructure for the Indian call centers of C&W clients.
“We see more and more processes offshored to India for cost reasons and because of the availability of skills in India,” Metrani said.
The ICE provides services to about 250 C&W customers. It manages about 4,000 network devices in total, including routers, switches and security appliances, that are spread across Europe, Asia, the U.S. and Latin America, Metrani said.
While C&W’s service centers in Hong Kong and Munich primarily service customers in those regions, or are specialized in a few services, ICE is positioned is a hub that offers a variety of network services worldwide, Metrani said.
As well as offering new services to clients, the Bangalore center will likely provide support and monitoring for C&W’s own information systems network, he said.
C&W’s Indian services operation was started in 1995 to support the network of the Indian operation of Standard Chartered PLC in London, a customer of C&W.
“As we had gained a lot of experience in managing networks, and we had a set of people who understood networking, we decided to offer network services from India,” Metrani said.
