Bangalore riots force long IT-BPO weekend

The day after iconic Kannada film hero Rajkumar died, India's IT-BPO capital came to a standstill but the contingency plans of companies prevented any disruption in services.

While information technology firms got a large number of their people to work from home, BPO companies diverted the traffic to their centres in other cities.

This is because almost 95 per cent of the staff could not make it to their work stations as mobs went on a rampage in the city.

IBM, a majority of whose 40,000 staff in India are spread across eight centres in the city, is understood to have totally shut shop for the time being, keeping only a small portion of its BPO work going.

According to IBM executives, most of the work has been diverted to the company's Delhi centre. Pureplay BPO firms like 24/7 Customer, too, had to down shutters today, making do with little staff, and had to divert work to other centres in India.

Almost the entire IT staff of software vendors chose to stay away from work as many of them had the liberty to co-ordinate work from home, unlike BPO staff that cannot work out of home because of data security or unavailability of bandwidth.

Infosys' IT employees, too, did not have to turn up for work ahead of the company's annual results tomorrow.