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Midlands tech dynasty SCC bypasses Europe, opens service centre in Vietnam

Tech skills in Europe? Dev ops? Yes we aware of them

Services-based reseller SCC has complained a dearth of skilled techies that come at competitive rates in Europe has forced it to look east: a service delivery centre is set to open in Vietnam.

Talking to El Chan, SCC chief exec James Rigby said it already has up to 1,000 workers based at a delivery centre in Romania, but “challenges” locally hindered further expansion.

“It was getting difficult to grow, recruit and get staff to work out of hours, so we looked further east. The Vietnam centre should go live in October with 50 people providing the more complex infrastructure support,” he said.

A team of 20 developers are to be recruited too, “people with those skills are not easy to find here [in Europe] and they are very expensive. We are not a big development house”.

The developers will work on service management tools, using the Service Now platform to track ticketing, incidents and enable cloud orchestration which requires automation.

Vietnam is seven hours ahead of the UK time zone, the average age of the 90 million strong population is 29 and there are 300 IT universities in the country, SCC told us.

Rigby said the “level of technical skills” in the country was “good”, and perhaps as importantly, the “cost base” remained competitive.

SCC’s customers include British Airways, TalkTalk, Ladbrokes, Highways England and Thomson.

Rigby claimed customers generally had no problem with SCC setting up service centres on the other side of the world as long as service level agreements were met.

The expansion came as SCC outlined its numbers for fiscal ’16 ended 31 March, with sales shrinking one per cent year-on-year to £653m, which is perhaps better than we expected given the shift toward selling tech as a service.

The company reported EBITDA of £24.9m, up 29 per cent year-on-year. ®

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