Wipro sets up engg centre for Harman

Bangalore: Wipro has set up an embedded engineering centre for US-based Harman International Industries Inc, to jointly develop products and technologies for the maker of audio and infotainment products.

The Harman development centre would operate from Wipro’s facilities in Bangalore and Chennai and would initially have a team of 250 engineers. Harman plans to scale up the headcount of this offshore facility to more than 1,000 by 2011, depending on how the partnership evolves. Harman, an existing customer of Wipro, is working with the Indian vendor since May in areas of enterprise application and infrastructure services.

“The centre will act as an extended engineering services organisation of Harman and we will jointly develop technologies relating to speech recognition and accident reduction, among others,” said Mr Suresh Vaswani, Joint CEO of Wipro Technologies.

“We will expedite the joint development of IP (intellectual property) through this partnership,” said Mr Dinesh Paliwal, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Harman.The audio and infotainment products maker, which serves automotive customers such as Mercedes Benz, Chrysler and Audi, also aims to bring its global brands such as Becker, DigiTech and dbx to the Indian market later this year.

“We were rather late in entering the Indian market and would like to make up for the lost ground,” Mr Paliwal said.

Maintaining that the focus of the partnership was co-innovation and not necessarily cost transformation, officials of both companies declined to comment on the revenue sharing model or the cost benefits that Harman would derive from the engagement.

The NYSE-listed Harman has some 50 people in India some of whom are working on certain point solutions in the software division.

A major part of Harman’s research and development work is done from its development centres in Germany, US and Canada, while it also employs some 1,100 people in China who mainly design the products.

Some of the products developed in India would be available by towards the end of next year.