Wind River mulls R&D centre

California-based device software optimisation (DSO) provider Wind River Systems, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation in July 2009, is planning to set up a research and development (R&D) centre in India to focus on innovation to its product line.

“We are currently scouting for a suitable location and the centre will be set up within the next two years,” Damian Artt, senior vice-president (worldwide sales and services, told Business Standard. He, however, declined to divulge the investment that the company intends to infuse into the proposed India R&D centre.

Artt was in Hyderabad to deliver the keynote address at the 2010 Wind River India Regional Developers Conference recently.

Wind River, whose technology is currently deployed in more than 500 million devices worldwide by industry leaders like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Motorola, Nasa and Mitsubishi, entered the Indian market with a strategic outsourcing partnership with Wipro Limited in 2005.

“The country’s industrial output rose 16.7 per cent in January 2010 from a year earlier, stronger than the market expectations, and India stands tenth in global spend with $24 billion in FY09. It is a critical market for Wind River,” he said.

Stating that the three markets in India that were most important to Wind River were aerospace and defence (A&D), industrial and networking, Artt said the company would have an equal focus on all the three verticals.

“In particular, we are working with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and other independent hardware providers. We currently have close to 100 customers in India. We added 25 new programmes in the A&D space in India last year, and expect to increase this by 20 per cent in 2010,” he said.

Time-to-market, cost and complexity driving the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) are the macro business trends in the A&D sector. Purchasing systems to reduce space, weight and power (SWaP) required for an aircraft’s on-board avionics systems will be the driving factors to our growth in India, Artt said, adding the $360-million (approximately Rs 1,600 crore) company was also looking at focusing on providing software design tools for devices such as smartphones in the Indian market.