Freemont, CA – February 12, 2014 – Concentrix is celebrating change, growth and the productive culture of its professional workforce across the planet. Employees on several continents have been holding festive ceremonies to commemorate the company’s combination with IBM’s customer relationship management through its newly announced CRM acquisition.
Cakes were cut across the United States at company centers from New York to California and Atlanta to Austin and Concentrix blue and white balloons were released in several countries as the company became a world leader in customer service this week.
Concentrix caters to a wide range of clients and operates from New England to New Zealand and China to Chennai. Now “One Team. One Company. One Concentrix,” the firm is welcoming thousands of new associates into the fold. Every country and even region has its own language. Most Concentrix employees are proficient in two or more and they all have been celebrating global unity this week.
Each Concentrix location also holds its own festivals, from Fremont, California’s annual Festival to India honoring the city’s diversity to India’s harvest festival of Pongal. Meaning “overflowing,” Pongal is observed for four days at the end of the harvest season in southern India in appreciation of abundance and prosperity.
Pongal takes its name from the Tamil word meaning “to boil” and is held when rice, sugarcane and turmeric, a tropical spice essential in traditional dishes, are harvested. It was recently marked by Concentrix workers in historic Chennai, formerly known as Madras, a coastal commercial center in South India.
“Pongal is considered incomplete without juicy sugarcane, hence we used sugarcane to decorate our office along with the ritual of boiling fresh milk in new clay pots,” said Balaji Natarajan, general manager of Concentrix India. “When the milk boils over and bubbles out of the vessel, everyone shouts “Pongalo Pongal!”
It is one of the most important festivals in the area where homes are seasonally decorated with banana and mango leaves and floors embellished with decorative patterns drawn in rice flour. The month of Tamil begins there on Pongal day.
In Chennai the Concentrix staff dressed in traditional clothing for the popular Hindu festival. Women wore the elegant draped sari — or saree — the classic garment well suited to the sultry South Asian climate. Male associates dressed up in the dhoti (also known as pancha, mardani or veshti). Wrapped around the legs and knotted at the waist, a dhoti resembles a long skirt.
“Pongal is a traditional occasion for giving thanks to nature, for celebrating the life cycles that give us grain. Tamilians believe knotty family problems will be solved with the beginning of the month that begins on Pongal day,” Natarajan said. “This also is the month of weddings.”
Pongal also indicated an auspicious beginning for the merging of the many IBM and Concentrix partners into one team at the first of February.
