Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc. has shifted 100 call-center jobs to the Philippines from Australia, where it has struggled to regain customers lost during operational disruptions there last year.
The jobs were moved to Manila, a burgeoning market for customer support as companies look to offset rising wages in India.
“It’s a lower-cost structure where a lot of call center off-shoring is going,” said Damon Wright, executive director of investor relations.
Ingram is the largest technology distributor in the world, with $36.3 billion in sales last year. The shift of call-center jobs from Australia brings its work force in Manila to 1,000.
Ingram faced a major systems glitch in Australia in early 2011, hampering sales and profit for most of last year. Chief Executive Alain Monie, who took the top job at Ingram nearly a year after the problems in Australia had come to light, has emphasized boosting efficiencies and regaining key customers who have gone to other distributors in the region.
A software and hardware systems overhaul in Australia was designed to improve automation, operations and services for customers and vendors around the world. But problems linking Ingram’s proprietary warehouse management system with the new system caused a backlog and other logistical problems internally and for customers.
The company spent most of the first half of 2011 fixing the problem, and now is zeroing in on getting back the customers it lost.
“We had mentioned sales in Australia weren’t coming back nearly as quickly as expected due to the economy and the highly competitive environment,” Wright said.
Kindiger Kudos
Payal Kindiger, vice president of marketing and services at San Clemente-based software maker gen-E, has joined an elite list of women technology executives.
Kindiger was named Woman Executive of the Year in the Golden Bridge Awards. Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Sunnyvale-based Yahoo! Inc., was honored with a silver award. Bronze winners included Margie Evashenk, chief development executive of Costa Mesa-based electronics networking maker Emulex Corp.
Gen-E makes and sells process-automation software for companies with annual revenue of about $200 million. It marked a 40% revenue rise to $25 million in 2011.
Kindiger played a key role in the company’s hiring increase and expansion in the past year, as well growing its managed services business past $12 million in annual sales.
The company boosted its work force by 150% in the last year to more than 100 employees.
The Golden Bridge Business and Innovation Awards are given to top industry performers and companies designated by a peer group of 40 judges.
Kindiger was honored earlier this month during the fourth annual awards dinner and presentation in San Francisco.
T-Mobile Huddles
Executives at Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile USA Inc. recently held a powwow with some 1,000 employees who work in Orange and Los Angeles counties.
It is set to combine operations with Dallas-based MetroPCS Communications Inc. in a reverse merger that will pay MetroPCS shareholders $1.5 billion. The combined company will have 42.5 million subscribers and revenue eclipsing $24.8 billion when the deal closes.
T-Mobile’s recent meeting with employees in OC and L.A. coincided with news of the deal. MetroPCS competes directly with Sprint’s Irvine-based Boost Mobile in the no-contract segment.
The two-day meeting, held at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel & Suites in downtown L.A., was part of a nine-city tour to bring its work force up to speed on the company’s corporate vision and infrastructure upgrades.
T-Mobile is updating some 3,200 cell sites in the region as part of an effort to boost its 4G long-term evolution network in a hotly contested race with Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp.
The company, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG, recently announced an unlimited talk, text and data plan for about $70 amid a boon in data consumption.
Traffic on T-Mobile’s network has increased 70%, and “we think it’s just the beginning of this curve,” said Andrew Sherrard, interim chief marketing officer and a senior vice president.
The company sees opportunity in the corporate segment and is courting local businesses, said Frank Singer, who leads the mobile business segment.
The company employs about 1,500 people in the Greater Los Angeles area and has some 2 million customers. The race to 4G supremacy in Orange County is still in its infancy, but Verizon is considered to have the early lead.
Computer Drives
Growing demand in the corporate business segment, and the upcoming release of the Windows 8 operating system, is expected to bring record hard-drive shipments in the computer market this year.
Englewood, Colo.-based market tracker IHS Inc. forecasts hard drive shipments to reach 524 million units this year, up 4.3% from 2011. The number is projected to increase through 2016, when sales could top 571.1 units in the computer market, which includes PCs, notebooks, corporate desktops and data center servers.
The overall hard-drive market is still projected to shrink in 2012 amid global economic concerns, particularly in Europe, and dampening consumer demand.
