14 DAY TRIAL // Dell made the news of closing down the Bangalore hardware division official at a meeting with the company employees. The Bangalore center will remain active, but will shift its operations from hardware design to software development. The company will contract other manufacturers able to do designs for the company's products.
Hardware design will be shifted from the old Bangalore facility to other design centers located in Austin and Taiwan, internal sources say. Dell has mentioned that the company would make this move some months ago, as part of their politics to use more contractors for designing future products.
The hardware design operation in India has been born in 2004. Dell had already been running software development operations in the country at the time when they started it. The company had over 500 employees to work in both hardware design and software development area, but the scheduled interruption of the hardware design operations is likely to affect under 100 employees. However, the Times of India newspaper stated that the company wrongly estimated the number of affected employees and presented that the hardware business shutdown will affect more than 170 staff members.
The Indian hardware design team had successfully accomplished the creation of a dual-socket server and a storage product, according to the Dell spokeswomen. "This is in line with our higher focus on solutions, which requires a lot of software development", the Dell India spokeswoman added.
Hardware and software development is not the only business Dell is successfully running across India. The company has also customer support centers in different cities across the country to deal with company's worldwide customers. The Dell spokespersons outlined that the shutdown of the company's hardware business will not bring an end to Dell's interest in India. Moreover, Dell officials have announced last year that the company plans on doubling the number of employees to 20,000 within a three-year timeframe.