/ 13 October 2004

Didata denies shedding jobs

Information technology group Dimension Data (Didata) said on Wednesday it is not planning to shed jobs in its Johannesburg global services centre (GSC) in favour of India, or relocating its local call centres to India.

Didata’s spokesperson stated that what is happening, however, is that Singapore-listed subsidiary Datacraft Asia has launched a GSC in Bangalore and this brings the total number of Didata GSCs to five — in addition to Boston, Melbourne, the United Kingdom’s Sunbury and Johannesburg centres.

The establishment of a GSC in Bangalore rolled Datacraft Asia’s five STARTtrac network services centres into one.

Datacraft has consolidated its managed services operations into the GSC in Bangalore with Singapore as the disaster recovery centre.

“Datacraft Asia will relocate its management centre and help-desk jobs to Bangalore from its centres in Japan, Korea and New Zealand. Didata GSCs [Boston, Johannesburg, Melbourne, UK] are not affected by this consolidation of Datacraft Asia’s GSCs,” said the spokesperson.

“Dimension Data and Datacraft Asia will, however, continue to look at maximising operations through further consolidation of our managed services in the future, as business requirements dictate.” — I-Net Bridge