Harman International Industries and Wipro Technologies, the global IT services company is launching a joint embedded engineering centre in India. The new Harman India Development Centre 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 centre will broaden and optimize Harman’s engineering footprint for developing audio and infotainment solutions across the automotive, consumer, and professional markets. Wipro will also bring a wide range of capabilities to Harman’s solutions. Services delivered from the centre will include both software development and related hardware engineering for Harman’s portfolio.

“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 CEO. “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.”

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