HP NZ shifts Telecom work to India

Hewlett-Packard has quietly shifted some of its support work for Telecom to India, and made some local HP Enterprise Services staff redundant.

HP was not prepared to comment on the changes, apart from saying “service agreements are regularly reviewed”, but Computerworld understands that at the beginning of October HP commenced a round of changes dubbed “Proposal for Financial Efficiency”.

Some staff at HP Enterprise Services, formed by the merger of HP’s outsourcing business and that of EDS New Zealand, which HP bought for US$13.9 billion in May, have been made redundant. The staff involved provided outsourced support for a large number of Telecom’s applications.

On top of that, lower severity fault service is being shifted to Chennai-based Mphasis, which EDS bought a controlling stake in in 2006, under HP’s “Best Shore” programme.

HP staff were recently performing what the company terms “knowledge transfer” of the Telecom applications to Mphasis staff who were on-site at HP in October. The HP employees were then made redundant and the Mphasis personnel returned to India in early December, Computerworld has been told.

HP has said that it would shed 7.5 percent of its staff. With an estimated 2800 employees, that equates to around 210 jobs lost.

After initially rebranding EDS as “EDS, a HP company”, Hewlett-Packard dropped the EDS name entirely in September in favour of HP Enterprise Services.