Harman International and Wipro form engineering partnership in India

Bangalore, Sept 2, (ANI/Business Wire India): Harman International Industries Inc. (NYSE:HAR) and Wipro Technologies, the global IT services business of Wipro Limited (NYSE:WIT), on Tuesday announced the launch of a joint embedded engineering center in India.

The new Harman India Development Center will operate from Wipro's existing Bangalore and Chennai facilities, complementing an earlier agreement which outsourced Harman's global IT infrastructure services to Wipro.

Beginning with about 250 employee resources through this engagement, Harman plans to grow its resource footprint in India to more than 1000 person-years by 2011, significantly strengthening its global engineering capabilities.

The India development center will broaden and optimize Harman's engineering footprint for developing audio and infotainment solutions across the automotive, consumer, and professional markets.

Wipro is the world's largest independent provider of Research and Development services and will bring a wide range of capabilities to Harman's solutions. Services delivered from the center will include both software development and related hardware engineering for Harman's portfolio. Harman will retain ownership of all intellectual property developed in the center.

"This new venture in India is an important milestone for enriching our portfolio of cutting-edge engineering solutions," said Dinesh C. Paliwal, Harman's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

"Wipro's proven development and project management expertise will complement our company's core audio and infotainment skills to deliver innovative customer solutions and make us more competitive. This expanded capability and capacity will also position Harman to better serve large emerging market opportunities in Asia," Paliwal said.

"Wipro's advances in IT and embedded engineering have enabled us to provide high-end solutions to our customers and we are pleased to support Harman's global leadership in premium audio and infotainment," said Suresh Vaswani, Joint CEO, IT Business and Executive Director, Wipro Limited.

The Harman India Development Center was formally commissioned in Bangalore on September 2 in ceremonies joined by Paliwal and Vaswani from Harman and Wipro respectively.

Commenting on the occasion, Azim H. Premji, Chairman - Wipro Limited, said: "Wipro's commitment to its innovation agenda will enable us to collaborate with Harman to localize, improve speed to market, create new avenues for business and help our partner maintain a competitive edge."

ANI