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Virgin outsources techies, pulls plug on Trowbridge call centre

80 tech jobs cut immediately - sources

Virgin Media has announced a major overhaul of its IT operations on the same day it revealed plans to shutter a call centre in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, which has almost 500 staff members.

The winding up of the call centre is part of Virgin's plan to shift its Mobile operation into the Virgin Media operation, which will mean a single billing system for the comms giant.

Virgin says that 450 people will be affected by the move, which will run over 18 months, but that they will all be offered the chance to relocate or redeploy to other roles in the UK.

This will mean 350 Wiltshire-based staff most likely facing a move to Manchester – and while they may have a job, they may not want to up sticks to the UK's rain capital. The other 100 will be offered jobs elsewhere in the Virgin empire.

However, one source told the Reg that Virgin has also kicked off a major shake-up of its tech operations, including a major outsourcing programme to Accenture.

The source said 174 people will be affected immediately, including 90 redundancies, details of which will be announced by close of play tomorrow.

As part of the process, IT staff will be centralised at Virgin Media's Hook base. However, the process will see IT services largely taken over by Accenture, the source said, with the outsourcing giant taking over validation, testing and a range of other roles.

A Virgin spokesman confirmed the outsourcing deal with Accenture, and that 80 roles were "at risk" but added, but that "affected staff would still be eligible for redeployment opportunities". ®

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