This article is more than 1 year old

Sophos to offshore American support operations

Blame Canada?

Exclusive Sophos plans to offshore support operations from the US to Canada and the Philippines as part of a wide-ranging restructuring of its support operations.

The plans were outlined in an internal email to staff from Mary Winfield, SVP Global Support, leaked to El Reg by an anonymous tipster. "Another year, another round of layoffs and another round of moving American jobs overseas," the source commented.

In response to queries from El Reg, Sophos downplayed the significance of the move, saying that there will be no overall reduction in headcount (ie no job losses) and adding that "all North America support resources are staying in North America" a statement that sits awkwardly with plans to use support workers based in the Philippines as one of two primary hubs for US support.

We will be making changes in our North America organization which will allow for clarity in team composition, improvements in our paid services delivery and the ability to provide proactive support. We will establish two primary centers for America’s support – Vancouver and Manila.

As part of this change, we will remove first level support from Burlington, and move that work to our two primary support centers [Vancouver and Manila].

Sophos's two main sales and marketing hubs are based in Burlington near Boston, Massachusetts and Abingdon, near Oxford in the UK. It will soon operate with eight global support centres, none of which are based in the US, according to Winfield's memo.

Going forward, as our business continues to grow, we also will grow our support capabilities, both through efficient use of new technology, tools, and process, as well as additional team members. We expect to grow our teams in all our key Support centers across the globe in Abingdon, Ahmedabad, Karlsruhe, Manila, Sydney, Tokyo, Vancouver, and Wiesbaden.

Sophos gave a lengthy response to our queries about its restructuring, republished in full below.

The purpose of any restructuring like this is obviously to better support and service our customers. To do that we wanted to align our support/services resources to our regional sales VPs and to our Business Units. So now each regional sales VP and each GM has a single point of contact within Support which will streamline communications and effectiveness.

As an example, the UKI team was previously reporting within the European division of Support, but to better align directly to the UKI Sales Team, they have been pulled out of that structure and now report directly to our SVP of Global Services and are a single point of contact to our UKI Head of Sales. No resource in the UKI support organisation is moving to any other location – they will support that region directly.

Similarly, all North America support resources are staying in North America and will serve as a single point of contact for our Head of Sales in the Americas. We have  not reduced our headcount, instead we have realigned headcount within the organisation. We are also investing additional resources in all our support locations around the world to make sure we continue to provide unparalleled service to our growing customer base.

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like