Wipro, with more than 12,000 engineers in Bangalore, India, is the world’s largest independent R&D services provider. Its R&D services business has grown an average 36% over the last three years, according to Sachin Mulay, Strategic Marketing Manager, Embedded and Product Engineering Group, Wipro, Bangalore, India.

The company provides services such as product strategy and architecture, product design and development, product verification and testing and product lifecycle management to companies in sectors including IT, consumer electronics, automotive electronics, medical devices and telecom.

Wipro is providing R&D expertise in some of the hottest technology areas for U.S. companies. For example, the Wipro RFID Centre of Excellence offers a portfolio of radio frequency identification enablement and deployment services for retail, consumer goods and distribution companies. The RFID center provides consulting, data integration, application development and deployment and data analytics. Mulay says Wipro has created an “Innovation Council” that funds and supports the development of intellectual property in areas such as wireless local-area networks, Linux and hands-free telephony technology.

Another R&D service provider, MindTree Consulting, is seeing 70%–90% annual growth in its business as demand for outsourcing increases, contends S. Janakiraman, President and CEO, R&D Services, MindTree, Bangalore, India.

The company leverages its expertise to offer custom product-development services including end-to-end new product development, creation of subsystems or modules of an existing product that need additional features, re-engineering of existing products, licensing of intellectual property on an upcoming technology and sustenance engineering of existing products to fix bugs and produce new releases.

Over the last 15 years companies, including computer hardware manufacturers, communications and networking system vendors and software application developers, have used offshore R&D services, says Janakiraman.

More recently companies in consumer appliances, storage systems, semiconductors, medical equipment and automotive/avionics engineering have outsourced R&D to India.