Iron Mountain outsources product development

MARCH 17, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Information protection and storage services provider Iron Mountain Inc. has outsourced some of its product development to Symphony Services Corp., a product development company with facilities in India, according to executives of both companies.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Symphony will have over 80 engineers in Bangalore and Pune working on the development of products for Boston-based Iron Mountain, Ajay Kela, president for India of Symphony, said Friday.

Symphony will also offer product management and user-interface design services to Iron Mountain, Kela said

The agreement between the two companies follows an earlier contract between them, whereby Symphony had about 25 staffers offering quality assurance and support for Iron Mountain products.

The Symphony centers in India will be an extension of Iron Mountain's own development centers, said Greg Nicastro, senior vice president for product development at Iron Mountain. Having a development center in India will help Iron Mountain work around the clock on product development, helping to cut time to market, he added.

Symphony will work on a variety of products, including Iron Mountain's digital archive service and on data protection products from Marlboro, Mass.-based LiveVault Corp., which Iron Mountain acquired earlier this year.

A number of multinational technology companies have set up wholly owned product development centers in India. But a large number of foreign companies now prefer to outsource product development to third-party operations in India that handle the hiring and management of the development teams.

Setting up a wholly owned center in India is not a core expertise of Iron Mountain, and the company preferred to partner with Symphony, which has experience in the area, Nicastro said.

Iron Mountain already has development centers in the U.S. and the U.K. where it employs about 200 developers.

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