No lay-offs in India, clarifies AT&T

Telecom giant AT&T, which is reportedly laying off about 12,000 people, about 4 per cent of its total global workforce, on Thursday said the company did not have any plan to retrench any of its 1,000-odd Indian employees. AT&T has three lines of business in India, which are into software development, application management and hosting and Global Network Services.

The Dallas-based, $120-billion company, which employs over 300,000 people worldwide, had recently announced to lay off some of its workforce, citing economic recession, along with corporate reorganisation and declining demand, among others.

“The lay-off plan will not have any impact in India and we are not going to retrench any employee here. This will have impact primarily in the US. We are still hiring in India,” said V S Gopi Gopinath, chairman and CEO, AT&T Global Network Services India. He, however, said the company is maintaining a bit of cautiousness in its hiring strategy.

“We are in a state of flux right now. There are changes that are happening throughout the world. But we are definitely hiring,” he added.

AT&T, which became the first global telecom operator to secure national long distance (NLD) and international long distance (INLD) licences in India through AT&T Global Network Services India, currently employs over 1,000 people in India. AT&T Global Network Services, a joint venture between AT&T and Mahindra Telecom Investment, began commercial services in India in early 2007.

The company currently claims to have won a lot of enterprise customers in India during the last more than one-and-a-half years, including TCS and Bank of India to name a few. Besides, the company has most of the Indian telecom service providers as its customers, who use the company’s network for international access.

Meanwhile, AT&T has opened its first data centre in India. Located in Whilefield, Bangalore, the new data centre aims at fulfilling the growing demand for online data centres from multinational customers in India. A part of the company’s $1-billion global investment plan announced for the year, the data centre will provide customers with managed hosting, application and networking services for their data and e-commerce needs.

Globally, AT&T manages 38 data centres located in 11 countries. “The Bangalore centre underscores AT&T’s commitment to the rapidly-expanding telecommunications sector in India and highlights the growing demand in this market. With the further enhancement of our hosting facilities in the Asia-Pacific region, AT&T will be able to support multinational customers in India,  who turn to us for integrated hosting and network solutions,” said Gopinath.

In the ongoing financial year, AT&T is also setting up a new node in India, which will take the total number of nodes owned by the company in India to eight. The new node will come up in Delhi, where the company already operates one node.