Motorola opens Bangalore research centre

Motorola Labs has opened an applied-research facility in the Indian city of Bangalore.

The lab - the 11th such centre opened by telecommunications giant Motorola and its first in India - will work on diverse applied areas such as converged networks, autonomic networking, enterprise applications, embedded systems and physical sciences.

Schaumberg, Illinois-based Motorola already has an India-based R&D infrastructure, which employs 1,700 engineers but it works mostly on software.

Motorola's research investment in India has grown this year, to $85m from the approximately $50m spent in 2002. The company plans to increase this investment by 10 per cent to 20 per cent per year.

Padmasree Warrior, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Motorola, said in a statement: "With access to India's proven best-in-class scientific and engineering talent and the ability to collaborate with world-class universities and institutes, Motorola believes India is the ideal market for applied research and software development."

Known more for outsourced customized software development, Bangalore has become very popular for technology companies. Companies including SAP, Microsoft Research and Google have opened research facilities in Bangalore. Motorola's rival Nokia recently announced plans to open a plant for cell phones in south India, better known as the Silicon Valley of India.