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ShareRolling Brownouts Jolt Outsourcers In Hyderabad
Posted by Bob Evans on Mar 16, 2009 09:10 AM
From 6 a.m. until noon two days a week, outsourcers in and around Hyderabad will receive no electrical power as part of the state-owned utility's plan for rolling brownouts until the end of summer. So check that fine print in your SLAs -- do they cover "load-shedding" contingencies?
Outsourcers without captive power generators in and around Hyderabad -- mostly small and medium-sized companies -- had to shut down temporarily last week when the first planned brownout hit, the Hindustan Times reported:
The power utility had informed the consumers about the decision to go in for load-shedding till summer passes, but the IT/ITES companies appear not to have planned for the eventuality.... "From tomorrow, we will reschedule the operation, by starting the office from noon. We may ask the staff to come on Saturday and Sundays, too," said [the] HR manager of one affected software company.
While this policy from the Andhra Pradesh Central Power Distribution Company has certainly had a short-term jarring impact on the hundreds of IT services companies located in and around Hyderabad, the very existence of many of those outsourcing companies has required great resiliency in a number of areas, such as aligning work schedules to map to those of their clients on the far side of the world.
My guess is that while this rolling brownout plan will be disruptive for the next few weeks, Hyderabad's entrepreneurial spirit will quickly overcome this set of inconveniences. And who knows: that same strain of animal spirits might even trigger a wave of innovative product introductions in the power-generator market to meet this new high-demand opportunity.
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