Wipro Technologies, headquartered at Bangalore, recently met with ARC to provide an update on the company's progress with the Automotive SPICE organization. Renukaprasad Sharma, Suresh Pesiappachari, Udaya Shastry, and Ashutosh Shrivastava of Wipro Technologies' Automotive Electronics Group briefed ARC about this.

Wipro Technologies recently received the Automotive SPICE Organizational Maturity Level 5 Certification. The certification relates to process capability and organizational maturity in domains such as design, development, conversion/porting, maintenance, and testing of automotive electronics. Wipro Technologies is the first company in the world to receive this certification.

In the automotive marketplace, where customers demand performance, quality, and value for money, success is ever more dependent on the ability to deploy quickly new technologies including electronic hardware and software. With more than 85 percent of the modern vehicle's functionality controlled by electronics and associated software, both motor vehicle manufacturers and automotive electronic equipment suppliers are grappling to find ways to cut down the time-to-market and development costs. Given the market ambience where product development times get shorter and competition grows sharper, the pressures on automotive equipment suppliers to work collabora-tively with vendors including IT service and product development companies are increasing. Automotive electronic equipment suppliers are developing vendor partner-ships with companies like Wipro who provide end-to-end product development ser-vices. The vendor assessment is done based on service provider's software development capability to ensure service quality, delivery methodology, and such others. Automotive SPICE Organizational Maturity Level 5 Certification provides such an assessment yardstick.

Wipro Technologies has a strong presence in automotive electronic-equipment design service marketplace, which is rapidly growing. Wipro Product Engineering Solutions Division's Automotive Electronics Vertical employs 550 software and IC design engi-neers and domain architects with expertise in navigation systems, digital radio receivers, telematics, body electronics, and others. Wipro's automotive electronic product development services include car interior controls, electronic power steering controls, engine management, and instrument clusters. The company serves automo-tive electronic equipment suppliers such as Delphi, Visteon, Johnson Controls, Magneti Marelli, Lear, and others. While the company serves close to 15 active cus-tomers in the automotive electronic space, Wipro has exclusive offshore development centers in India with an average team size of 50 people for two of these equipment suppliers. In addition to serving the automotive electronic equipment industry, Wipro also carries out reference design and concept design to semiconductor companies sup-plying ASICs used in automotive equipment. Every year Wipro releases more than 15 ASIC designs that find application in the automotive space.

Recently Wipro became an associate member of the prestigious AUTOSAR (Automo-tive Open System Architecture) partnership. The AUTOSAR standard serves as a platform upon which future vehicle applications will be implemented. Wipro is also a member of the automotive industry focused bodies like STAR (Standards for Technol-ogy in Automotive Retail), OESA (Original Equipment Suppliers Association) and AIAG (Automotive Industry Action Group).

About Wipro Technologies

Wipro Technologies is a division of Wipro, a sixty-year-old company with a diversified portfolio of offerings whose annual earnings exceed $2 billion. Wipro Technologies, with revenues exceeding $1.8 billion, currently serves over 500 clients spanning 35 countries. Employing around 50,000 IT professionals and domain consultants, the company has 54 dedicated development centers across India, Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Wipro Technologies broadly divides its business into Technology and Enterprise Busi-nesses. Two divisions addressing the technology business opportunities are Telecom Service, and Embedded and Product Engineering, while Finance Solutions and Enter-prise Solutions comprise the Enterprise Business.

About Automotive SPICE

The Automotive Special Interest Group launched the Automotive SPICE initiative to develop a common framework for the assessment of suppliers in the automotive in-dustry. This resulted in the publication of the Automotive SPICE process assessment model and associated process reference model. The Automotive SPICE initiative in-cludes car manufacturers such as Audi, BMW, Daimler Chrysler, Fiat, Ford, Jaguar, Land Rover, Volkswagen, and Volvo. Although the Automotive SPICE initiative is largely by European automotive manufacturers, it is gaining acceptance by the compa-nies in the US and Japan.

ARC's Analysis and Comments

ARC Analyst Rajabhadur and Libi Baskaran believes that automotive electronic equip-ment manufacturers, working under time-to-market and cost pressures, would prefer to work with service providers with certified process capabilities and organizational maturity and complying with industry standards. By securing Automotive SPICE Or-ganizational Maturity Level 5 Certification, Wipro Technologies has acquired a vantage position. Wipro's existing quality adherence certifications such as SEI CMMi and Six Sigma methodologies helped the company to win the race. Further the company's recent acquisitions of New Logic and Quantech confer on Wipro the location advan-tages that optimize delivery processes and augment company's domain skills.

Automobiles extensively use electronics, and the automotive industry has been an early adapter of outsourcing services. Given this scenario, ARC believes Wipro's deft moves to emerge as a leading end-to-end product development service-provider would be watched with keen interest by its competitors.

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