Unisys opens offshore center in Bangalore

BANGALORE: Technology solutions and services provider, Unisys Corporation is setting up its first global offshore outsourcing center in Bangalore, India. To be 2000 strong in the next five years, the company has earmarked an investment of $180 million for its Indian operations during the same period. "Unisys might set up offshore centers in other cities of India or in other global locations, but the Bangalore center is the first. Eastern Europe and China looks like a strong bet for centers," said Cal Killen, Vice President, Unisys Global Services.

With the global workforce of 37,000 employees, Blue Bell, Philadelphia headquartered, Unisys plans to add 300 people in Bangalore this year and ramp up to 1000 by next year. Killen assured that these are new jobs that are created by Unisys and that it had no plans to move jobs from any of its other centers globally. "Customers prefer giving us the order, if we don't outsource the work to vendors in India, instead have our own centers and that is one of the main reason why we have set up a offshore center in Bangalore," commented, Killen.

Unisys is present in India for the past two decades, first through Tata Unisys, which eventually parted ways to become Tata Infotech and Unisys India Limited. The $5.9 billion company outsources software development work to Indian vendors including, Tata Infotech, Caritor, Hexaware and NIIT. "Although we would be doing software development work at our own center in Bangalore, we would continue to outsource 70 percent of the work to our vendor partners in India. Including the vendor partners, Unisys expects the workforce to be 3,000 strong in the next five years, currently there are about 500 representing Unisys through the vendors," informed Killen.

The company has sales offices in India at Mumbai and Delhi and service clients such as Air India, State Bank of India and ICICI. The offshore center in Bangalore is independent of its sales office in India and plans to provide software development, maintenance, BPO and technical help desk services.

CIOL Bureau