Cisco encourages 12,000 employees to work from home

Cisco encourages 12,000 employees to work from home

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Bangalore: Now IT companies are encouraging the employees to work from home or somewhere else instead of office. Cisco,one of the computer networking majors, has revealed that out of the total 60,000 employees, about 12,000 globally are working remotely.

Cisco's headcount in India has reached at 4000. "We are allowing employees if they want to work at home, when there is no meeting and other activities which he/she is supposed to take part," said Varghese M Tomas, Vice President, Corporate Communications India and SAARC, Cisco System.

Earlier, Wipro, one of the major IT companies in India, had stated that about 1,100 of its employees are working at home in its Bangalore centre only and almost 30 percent of its employees will be allowed to work at home in near future.

As part of making work at home more systematic, Cisco has launched its latest virtual office solution, Cisco Virtual Office (CVO), which intents to address the need of mid-sized and large enterprises to provide access to collaborative business applications and services to their employees working in remote areas. CVO packages routing, switching, security, wireless, IP telephony and policy control technology into a centrally managed office caliber solution that provides highly secure video, voice, data and wireless service.

CVO will enable employees to work in a variety of places with technology and services that are as advanced as if they were sitting at their desk in their office. Employees can access to voice and video over IP communication and all protected within a secure network environment.

As scarcity of office space, high office maintenance cost and increase in total operational cost take most of the businesses away from deploying more workers, CVO is expected to become an option before corporates to employ as many workers as they need.

Shoukath Koduvally

Source: http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/46370