Audio and infotainment giant Harman International Industries and Wipro Technologies 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. Harman has also outsourced its 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.

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 expanded capability and capacity will also position Harman to better serve large emerging market opportunities in Asia,” said Dinesh Paliwal, Harman's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

The Harman India Development Center was formally commissioned in Bangalore on September 2 in ceremonies joined by Dinesh Paliwal and Suresh Vaswani from Harman and Wipro respectively. Commenting on the occasion, Azim 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.”