Astrology  Chat  Cityscape  Classifieds  Entertainment  Health  Matrimonial 
Music  News  Panorama  Search  Shopping  Services  Tours & Travel  Home

Reaffirming its long-term commitment to SlashSupport, Euro 12.5 billion Global Networking major Alcatel has set up a state-of-the-art lab at the SlashSupport facility in Chennai geared to simulate a complex array of possible problem scenarios at end-customer locations, and enable effective advanced tech support solutions.

Steve Tufts, Vice President, Alcatel inaugurated on April 1, 2004, the simulation and testing lab at the SlashSupport facility in Chennai. The Lab has been set up at an investment of over $2 million and will enable testing and troubleshooting, simulating advanced carrier-class networking technologies and applications. SlashSupport will now support Alcatel’s next generation product portfolio, which delivers carrier-class features and functionality with unprecedented port density and throughput for IP Communications, core implementations, and mission-critical environments.

Steve Tufts said in Chennai, “SlashSupport has demonstrated their ability to help us reduce costs and generate increased revenues from our top enterprise customers thus making us more globally competitive. The new lab is critical in the expanded role SlashSupport will now play, supporting our entire range of products.”

The Alcatel lab is equipped with terminal servers for remote access from the engineers’ workstations. The lab is on a separate gigabit local area network to enable high performance of the products. The Alcatel Lab will enable simulations and testing customer scenarios for the SlashSupport engineers while providing support for the Alcatel products. The lab has capability of running multiple test beds on platforms like ATM, Frame Relay, Ethernet, Security which can be managed with a high end Network Monitoring Software (NMS) console.

Shiva Ramani, CEO, SlashSupport, in his response, said “ In our phase 1 engagement with Alcatel, all SLAs were met and surpassed, which laid the foundation for our enhanced relationship with Alcatel covering their entire range of high availability, intelligent data network products.”

In the expanded relationship, SlashSupport’s team of high-tech engineers will provide advanced tech support for Alcatel’s high-end large networking products for their customers in the large global enterprise and telcos verticals, across 80 countries in APAC, Latin America, US and EMEA. SlashSupport’s team will support over 1,000 customer installations worldwide.

SlashSupport will support the next generation range of multi-layered high availability networking switches. These switches run on the Alcatel Operating System (AOS) as compared to the XOS earlier. The new products also comprise the latest NMS and the Wireless products, Shiva Ramani said,

These Alcatel products provide non-blocking 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, carrier-class availability, multi-layer security, intelligent switching and routing services, and dynamic mobility – all at wire speed. Working on these technologies will definitely keep the engineers at the cutting edge of technology whose adoption in Indian scenario might still be some years away.

Outsourcing the worldwide advanced tech support function to SlashSupport is expected to help Alcatel increase sales and register a significant saving by reallocating their in-house tech support resources on building new generation products, thus making the tech adoption cycle faster, Shiva Ramani added.

The advanced tech support will involve issues relating to configuration, troubleshooting, design and performance related issues. SlashSupport will offer level 1,2 and 3 support for all customers who call in.

Sanjiva Singh, Executive Sponsor, SlashSupport-Alcatel relationship added, “Alcatel is strategic to SlashSupport in that the advanced tech support we provide them has never been outsourced to India before. It is imperative that we continually deliver on the Alcatel opportunity, because this will help grow the advanced tech support capability in India. Alcatel’s decision to invest in a state-of-the-art lab at SlashSupport, and to entrust support for their entire range of products to us, is a reaffirmation that we are on the right track.”

Offshoring advanced tech support - Benefits to Alcatel

Significant cost reduction in excess of 30% Saving of resources, resulting in shorter product development cycle Increase in sales due to increased customer satisfaction Increased coverage with 7/24 support team Flexibility in support operations One-stop shop for all support needs

Specifics on the expanded engagement

SlashSupport to provide advanced tech support for the entire range of Alcatel products To support top global enterprise customers of Alcatel in over 80 countries To engage high end engineers on the Alcatel account To provide L1,L2,L3 support Alcatel invests over $2 million to set up simulation and testing lab at the SlashSupport facility in Chennai

SlashSupport Service Offerings include Enterprise Technology Application & Product Support,Consumer Technology Application & Product Support and System Management Services. Highly qualified engineers, troubleshooting skills across multiple technology platforms, handling enterprise customers, customer environment simulation in Lab and integration with client’s product engineering team are some of the unique features at SlashSupport.

The company has plans to hire over 1,200 persons in 2004 for its advanced tech support facility in Chennai, to add to its existing staff strength of over 750. The company targets to end FY2004 with revenues of $22m, almost a three-fold jump from the FY2003 revenues of $8million.

SlashSupport has a 1,000 seat advanced tech support facility in Chennai spread over 2 delivery centres. In addition to its advanced tech support facility in India, SlashSupport also has a Business Continuity Center in Singapore. The Singapore facility will function as a country redundancy center and is connected to SlashSupport’s telecom gateway via different links and carriers.

SlashSupport’s 100% referenceable clientele includes, among others, one of the top five software companies in the world, three of the world’s leading Home/SOHO networking product companies and one of the world’s leading Reporting and Business Intelligence solution company.

SlashSupport (a CSS Group Company), is India’s first pure play advanced tech support company founded by Cybernet Software Systems and Baring India Investment Limited. The company has a strong 100% referenceable client base of 15 global clients (top 5 clients have a combined revenue in excess of US $ 85 billion per year).

VC-funded SlashSupport operates in the advanced technology support space, specialising in both, Enterprise and SOHO/End user (Consumer) Technical support. The company has a strong board, which includes Mark Parker, Senior Vice President, Fossil Corporation, a NASDAQ listed fashion accessories firm whose brand portfolio includes Fossil, Burberry & Armani and Phaneesh Murthy, CEO, iGATE Global Solutions.

Alcatel provides end-to-end communications solutions, enabling carriers, service providers and enterprises to deliver content to any type of user, anywhere in the world. Leveraging its long-term leadership in telecommunications network equipment as well as its expertise in innovative applications and network services, Alcatel enables its customers to focus on optimizing their service offerings and revenue streams.

RR

Recommend this page	Mail us your feedback