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Mincom denies Aussie offshoring

Privately held software house Mincom today denied claims the company was shifting Australian jobs to Malaysia, saying it was in fact moving roles away from its Indian facility.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

update Privately held software house Mincom today denied claims the company was shifting Australian jobs to Malaysia, saying it was in fact moving roles away from its Indian facility.

Industry sources had claimed the company was shifting roles to Kuala Lumpur. Earlier this year, Mincom conceded that in February it had let go of 100 staff globally, which included 50 from Australia.

A Mincom US spokesperson today said that the last round of Australian redundancies had occurred prior to June this year, but denied this was related to its Malaysian move.

Separately, Greg Clark, who is based in Brisbane and was appointed as chief executive to the private-equity owned ERP vendor in April 2008, said the reason for moving staff away from India was because of the churn rate it experienced in the country.

"Recently, Mincom has begun to shift the majority of these technical resources from India to Malaysia. This is due to the fact that Malaysia offers a better time zone for Mincom as well as a more stable workforce with less employee churn," he told ZDNet.com.au by email.

Mincom in 2008 had made moves to offshore some work to ValueLabs, an Indian company specialising in offshore software development and testing. The spokesperson declined to confirm the name of its Indian supplier(s). "Mincom is trying to survive the current economic environment," the spokesperson said.

Clark said that Mincom remained committed to retaining the majority of its R&D in Australia. "Mincom will continue to invest in these valuable human resources. No Australian jobs have been outsourced," he said.

Clark said that the staff in Malaysia were in-house employees rather than staff from a separate entity. Mincom's Malaysian operations are headed up by Clark's fellow former E2open colleague, Chris Birrell, who was appointed to the role in January this year.

Clark said contrary to claims by sources, Mincom was not in discussions with Queensland state government clients over the transfer of resources to Malaysia. "It should be noted that these resources are full employees, in-house as opposed to 'outsourced'. Mincom takes advantage of its global operations whenever it makes economic sense to do so, performing development, support and consulting activities out of Mincom operations in USA, Chile, South Africa and Malaysia as well as Australia," said Clark.

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