Probably an improvement

Having run a reasonable sized network over Clot, I welcome this move.

Firstly out of spite, since I personally hate the staff at Colt, and a bunch of them losing their jobs is something I'd like to see.

To quote their former CEO when I asked him why they had screwed up a minor s/w fix so badly that several banks had fallen off the network, "some teenagers are actually quite good".

I'd been angry that they had failed to carry out simple tasks yet again, and had asked why they were using teenagers to do jobs meant for grownups. Even though by this point we had someone whose fulltime job was hassling Colt to do what we paid them for, I hadn't really thought that they were using children, but I learned that in the name of cost saving there is nothing so recklessly stupid that Colt won't do it.

I'd rather talk to a Spaniard who had no English than any of the dimwits that Colt UK has in support.

I am no fan of BT, but once when they'd also screwed up, the account exec did at least say "but at least we're not Colt". When BT use your pathetically incompetent staff to prove they are not the worst comms supplier to deal with, you know you're dealing with Colt.

We also could never even get them to bill us properly either.

tip of the iceberg

not only that, but I've heard that Colt is in the process of off-shoring 90% of it's European based Engineering team to India. This is the team who are responsible for product innovation, 4th line support & selection of new equipment for the network.

Good luck to Colt & it's customers after this 'bold' move.

Fingers and toes crossed

'She said insider reports received by El Reg that the Indian staff had not been properly trained to run the relevant equipment were untrue.

"This has been planned for a long time," she said.'

What - Colt had planned to not have properly trained staff to run the relevant equipment for a long time?

So the customer service function is still being performed in Europe. But the "techie" stuff is now in the hands of Indian staff, who may not be sufficiently trained.

I thought the idea of offshoring was to save money. A single major outage that might still have occured whilst the network ops was outside of India is sure to be blamed on the offshoring strategy. Prime customers will be off to the first supplier who can assure them as soon as their contract comes up for renewal.

'Course finding a telecoms supplier who hasn't offshored could be a toughie, but it appears the Board of Directors of Colt have decided to take a bit of a risk-hoping that a horrible f^&k-up doesn't take place before the new staff pick-up enough experience and knowledge if the inside whispers are indeed correct.

Long time? Two weeks was it?

Ever since the last outage

Timely article again from El Reg

We're soon to move offices, I won't be looking at Colt to provide telco services then...

Boffins despised

Most company's in the UK hate their technical staff as they are normally all clever cloggs and make the management and general pen pushers feel inferior.

Solution ? farm the job out to some idiots you can revel in telling off on a regular basis (normally somewhere in the 3rd world so you can feel financially superior also)

This makes said managers feel superior again for the brief 5mins they still have a job.

Offshoring isn't automatically bad..and another classic COLT story

Gotta say, there are an awful lot of very bright Indians out there. So don't assume that just because colt are outsourcing to bangalore or wherever that they're going to get idiots. And let's face it, given colt's record things might actually improve.

My favorite COLT story comes from a friend who had to support an app running on colt's servers. They called up one day in a tiz cos the servers had dropped off the network. Obviously an outrageous outage. Could he find out wtf was going on?

Few hours later, turns out that the techs in the CO had decided the servers couldn't be very importasnt cos no one ever visited them so they pulled them out of the racks and stuffed them in a Transit van. Stellar.

So what if the Indian staff are trained ?

It does not really matter if the Indian staff are "sufficiently trained", does it ?

Because they will leave.

Staff turnover in Indian support centres is huge, and so even if the Clot staff were up to speed, 6 months from now they won't be.

As the learned respondent earlier pointed out, these contracts are driven by price, not quality, and so the bidders will not try very hard to retain good staff, since they can replace them with cheaper ones, and not spend much on training

Also, the good ones they keep can be moved to show prospective clients the quality of their people. The incentive is to get business, not satisfied customers.

In that, there is no real difference between outsourcing to India, or to a firm in your home town.

However, the short term savings look good enough to earn bonuses executives, especially accountants, .so they do not really care all that much.

That being said, there is something quite special in the culture at Colt. Why did they not outsource years ago when if was fashionable ?

If you'd met Colt executives, then you'd know why.

They are only dimly aware that they are a telecoms company, and I disagree with the earlier poster who said they hate boffins. That is true of middle management at Colt, but the senior execs don 't really meet techies enough to hate or like them. They have the same understanding and relationship with technology that the Queen has when she opens a high energy physics lab. Like the Queen, they are polite to the greasemonkeys, feign interest, and then go to lunch to chat about golf.

I was going to use Prince Phillip as the example there, but he actually has an interest in technology, something Colt board members would regard as making the Prince their social inferior. I don't think he even plays golf, so certainly is not qualified to be an exec at Colt.