Dell adding 2,000 more staff in India

It opened its first customer contact center in Bangalore in 2001

News Story by John Ribeiro

APRIL 29, 2005 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Dell Inc. plans to increase the number of staff at its Indian call center and software development operations to 10,000 by the end of the year, the company's CEO said today.

Dell currently employs about 7,000 to 8,000 staff in India, Dell President and CEO Kevin Rollins told reporters during a visit to Bangalore.

Dell stopped routing some technical calls from corporate customers to India in late 2003 after receiving complaints about poor quality of service. The problems weren't related specifically to outsourcing in India, Rollins said, but were more a reflection of the company's failure to effectively manage the rapid growth of its operations in the country.

"Rather than pull back, we shifted resources into other product categories and took our time, and that was read by some as a lack of confidence in India, a pullback from India, which is not true," Rollins said.

The Round Rock, Texas, company will continue to increase its head count and operations in India, but it now knows how to do it better, Dell's CEO said.

Dell opened its first customer contact center in Bangalore in 2001, initially providing technical support for customers in the U.S. It set up another contact center in Hyderabad last year and a third this year in Mohali, in Punjab.

The company has also set up a product team in Bangalore that develops and tests some of Dell's enterprise server and storage products, and a software development center that serves Dell's internal information systems requirements. "We need talent in India to help us grow our business," Rollins said.

The company recently unveiled a plan to achieve $80 billion annual revenue by 2009. As it looks to reach that target, over 55% of the growth will come from outside the U.S., with revenues from Asia, Japan and Europe showing higher growth than the U.S., Rollins said.

Dell is turning from a PC company to a broad-based IT supply company, Rollins said. However, while Dell has been offering managed services, its strategy is to offer only services that relate to its hardware business. It does not plan to offer the broader range of services that some of its compebreastors offer, such as business process outsourcing and large outsourced IT contracts, Rollins said.

Dell said yesterday that it had been awarded a three-year, multimillion-dollar contract by Honeywell International Inc. in New Jersey to provide managed services throughout that company's IT network in the U.S. "Our services strategy is to work in tandem with our hardware business, where we apply a layer of support services around the hardware and then, over time, add to the menu and increase those support services around the hardware," Rollins said.