Sophos to offshore American support operations Sophos plans to offshore support operations from the US to Canada and the Philippines as part of a wide-ranging restructuring of its support operations. The plans were outlined in an internal email to staff from Mary Winfield, SVP Global Support, leaked to El Reg by an anonymous tipster. "Another year, another round of layoffs …
...when questioned on motivation, "so we make more money and I get a bigger bonus"?
Its a shame they have to spout bullshit like "to better support and service our customers", "better alignment", "investing additional resources".
Just be honest guys. We are not dumb and we can see right through you.
Don't forget:
"allow for clarity in team composition"
Is this what they teach in business school then? Is it really as simple as being a degree doubletalk and gobbledygook??
Oh, and mark me down as never recommending Sophos to a client again!! If you sell it here then support it here is what I look for.
OK, I can understand why a company would offshore work to somewhere that it can be done more cheaply, but let's not dress up a financially-motivated decision with transparent PR about how no jobs will be lost (unless you happen to be holding one of the ones that is being offshored) and how this will improve customer support (By getting rid of the experienced support personnel and replacing them with offshored labor)
This is very bad timing if nothing else. With all the speculations and uncertainty around security vendors, Sophos decide that offshore to the Philippines is a good idea. The Canadian office will just be a micro office to manage those customers that simply will not deal with offshore support (GUARANTEED). We are beginning to see the cracks appearing as the newer smaller vendors and MSP's grow in the cloud market.
GUARANTEE thats what's happening. The truth is they're firing people in the Boston office to replace them with people in the Philippines, but keeping a few folks around to make sure their marquee customers don't notice. The people who are willing to pay get quality support. To me, this is a good business decision but points at financial weakness since the cost of having to maintain and renew a customer isn't being factored into the long term strategy. To make matters worse, their primary market-- AV and appliances-- are saturated with competitors and is losing share to the cloud. So maybe the Philippines can help the execs get their bonuses, and really, isn't that what matters to Mr. Hagerman and Ms. Winfield?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
