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Wipro Ltd., Indias thirdlargest IT services provider, has set up an embedded engineering centre for USbased Harman International Industries Inc., to jointly develop products and technologies for automotive, consumer and professional markets. As a part of the contract, Wipro will set up a dedicated engineering centre which will work on existing and future projects of Harman in the infotainment space.
Under the deal, Wipro will set up a Harman India development centre at its Bangalore and Chennai facilities. The plant will concentrate on software and hardware engineering to develop next generation embedded solutions for Harmans customers.
The alliance will also complement the outsourcing of Harmans IT infrastructure services to Wipro Technologies. However, Harman will hold the IP intellectual property developed in the centre by Wipro engineers.
Both partners plan to start facility initially with a team of 250 engineers, which may further be increased to more than 1,000 by 2011, depending on how the partnership evolves.
Its certainly not a conventional outsourcing deal, and a time and material contract. This deal is a manifestation of our positioning of the product engineering services as a business line for us. We are going to be an extended engineering services organisation for Harman which will leverage the R&D engineering services expertise to reduce time to market for new products and come out with innovative solutions committed to its automotive customers globally,” said Suresh Vaswani, Joint CEO, Wipro Technologies.
The New York Stock Exchange listed Harman International Industries involves in the designing, manufacturing and marketing of audio and infotainment products for the automotive, consumer and professional markets. The company employs more than 12,000 professionals worldwide. Besides, the company has a team of 1,100 in China. Dinesh C Paliwal, Harman’s chairman and CEO said, The new venture in India is an important milestone for enriching our portfolio of engineering solutions. We have USD14 billion worth of business backlog till the end of last fiscal. Many of the projects we are working on in the joint engineering centre, will cater to the backlogs, and the scope of the centre will keep on growing with the demand from our customers.
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