Dell to Close Hardware R&D Unit in India

American technology company Dell has announced plans to integrate its hardware R&D activities in Bangalore, India with its units in Austin and Taiwan, Business Standard has reported.

Consequently, the 100-150 people associated with this practice at the Bangalore R&D unit will be redeployed, transitioned into other roles, or paid severance packages.

A spokesman at Dell India said: “Our future mission in India has been redefined. The country has great strengths in software. So our focus here will be on software development, solutions, testing and documentation. We will be hiring people in these areas.”

According to Business Standard, the Bangalore R&D center was founded in 2001 and focuses on software development, enterprise solutions, international product support, test engineering, and documentation.

Test engineering successfully piloted lab-to-lab connectivity between Bangalore center and the Austin design center (ADC) in the second quarter of fiscal 2006. Since then, the R&D center included hardware from ADC using lab-to-lab connectivity as part of the test block efforts. The company claims the R&D center in India to be the second largest outside the US.

Besides software development and hardware design, Dell also has customer support centers in India, that service its customers worldwide. The company announced last year that it plans to double the number of staff it employs in India to 20,000 in next three years.

In January 2007, Dell’s competitor Intel shut its two year old R&D lab in South Korea as a part of its world-wide downsizing.

Source: ComputerWire daily updates