Wipro will pay an undisclosed sum to acquire the related assets plus 58 Nokia Siemens employees, and the two parties said they have started negotiations with local labor unions over the move.
The move comes just a week after Nokia Siemens revealed a similar deal with IBM to transfer 235 employees working in R&D around its next-generation voice and multimedia, media gateway, mobile internet connections, and consumer and business VoIP.
In September, Nokia Siemens handed over the running of its R&D center in Herentals, Belgium, to Devoteam, in a move which saw 160 staff switch over to the French IT services supplier.
As was the case with the IBM deal, Nokia Siemens said a big factor behind the outsourcing move is to gain access to greater global delivery capabilities. Wipro has been providing software development and R&D services to Nokia Siemens for several years, and the deal is a further example of how Indian services companies are becoming increasingly willing to take on their clients’ assets as part of outsourcing contracts.
