Symantec Australian engineer jobs lost to India

No need for resellers to panic over offshoring, Symantec says.

Symantec has sacked an engineering development team to ship jobs to India and other low-wages countries to offset flagging sales.

Steve Martin, Symantec Australia’s head of SMB and distribution said he anticipated little impact on the channel from the jobs losses.He said Symantec's partners should have no reason to question the quality of its offshore development.

The information security vendor told CRN that it was making “some redundancies” at its North Sydney engineering team but declined to say how many workers would lose their jobs or whether more redundancies were planned. 

A spokesman said the redundancies would “improve productivity and drive operational efficiencies”. 

Symantec’s head of corporate communications for Australia and New Zealand Debbie Sassine said that jobs would go to India where it had engineers and other low-cost countries.

She said it was not tied to plans to merge Symantec.Cloud into the broader business, which channels director Jeff Arndt said yesterday before news of the jobs losses would happen over the next six months. Symantec formed the cloud security business out of MessageLabs, whoch it bought in 2008 for $US695 million.