The Hindu Business Line : Colt Tele plans BPO centre at Gurgaon

WHILE most international firms have been in the silent mode about setting up back office operations in India, a European provider of telecom services plans to set up a BPO here even though it will lead to job losses at its European operations.

The first phase of the BPO operations of the UK-based Colt Telecom will find the Indian operations performing regular processes such as billings, account receivables, order tracing and order inputs.

Plans to make the Indian unit a full-fledged Centre of Excellence are also a part of the company's long-term strategy for Colt's Indian operations. The BPO facility would be housed in Gurgaon with an initial investment of Rs 20 crore.

Mr Richard Adams, COO, Colt Technology Services India, said: "We expect to move lots of jobs here and this will have some implications on the European operations.

"A proportion of the recruitment done here will create job losses in Europe. But we will give them abundant notice since we do have responsibility in Europe. By setting up BPO operations in India, our operational costs will go down by 50 per cent."

Initially, Colt Technology Services India will hire 200 persons. It plans to scale up the team to 600 engineers by 2005.

Offering voice, bandwidth, data centre solutions and managed network services plans, Colt Telecom expects to utilise the Indian subsidiary to perform high-end functions including monitoring and management of its European network, security, design on customer sites and (communications) backbone over the coming year.

"We will slowly shift some software development and network design work to the Indian operations over the next two years," Mr Adams said.

The Centre of Excellence would focus on telecom network management and design along with security services like intrusion detection and firewall monitoring.