Technology companies claim they’re unaffected by Indian power outage

Despite the huge power outages across most of Northern India, technology companies operating in the country have said that it is business as usual.

However, resellers have hinted that all may not be well.

The power outages are said to have affected 600 million people, as well as shutting down rail networks, lifts and electricity sources.

However, the likes of Microsoft, Dell and Infosys, who run outsourcing, software development and back office operations are claiming they have not seen any problems with their services or staff.

They said this was because they had back up power generators, which had been used.

Infosys, which runs offices in Bangalore, told ChannelBiz: “None of our operations have been impacted by the power outage. We have development centres and offices in some of the affected cities, namely Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Bhubaneswar, however our operations have been uninterrupted as we have power generation capabilities in place at these and our other locations across the country.”

A spokesperson for the company added that the company’s staff had also made it into work though the “usual mode,” which she described as “transport including cars, buses etc”.

Dell also claimed that a power generator was saving its working conditions. The company which has a customer contact centre in Gurgaon near Delhi and Mohali near Chandigarh in northern India, said it had not seen any problems as a result of this.

And other companies are citing their locations as a saving grace.

Microsoft said it had not had any problems because its sites were based in the western and southern parts of the country, which had not been affected.

But it contradicted Infosys claims of staff business as usual, claiming that its employees had faced some “inconvenience”.

However, all may not be what it seems with a Microsoft reseller hinting that there “may be a few lies flying around”.

One told ChannelBiz: “Although we don’t usually ever call the company in India, we had a query we needed to rectify – we can’t go into detail. Although the call was placed within working hours we were met with a dead dial tone. We tried again a number of times that day and four hours later we finally got through. No explanation was given when we queried.”

Fears that vendors, particularly Intel, could move to bump up prices in the wake of the crisis have also so far been allayed with resellers telling ChannelBiz that they had not yet seen any evidence of this.

One told ChannelBiz: “We’ve not been given any hints that Intel is going to hike up price protection on its process. If it does so in the wake of this then we’ll be disappointed. Of course it’s not uncommon for big vendors to take advantage of disasters but come on, there are some morals they need to stick to, aren’t there?”

Another added: “No we’ve not seen any evidence of this- but it’s early days, we may see this becoming a trend in the future if predictions that this may happen again arise.”