NEW DELHI: EADS, the European aerospace major and the parent of Airbus Industries, is opening a research and technology center in Bangalore today. The research facility will be co-located with Airbus Engineering Center India, which has been operational since 2007. The research center is part of EADS Innovation Works, the R&D network of the company.

EADS Innovation Works India will manage and broker R&T projects for the EADS business units and the corporate R&T Organization. The India research center, its third outside Europe, is starting with five employees, all recruited locally.

Apart from doing research on its own, it will also carry out research in collaboration with Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and IITs. At present, it has relationship with IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kharagpur. The projects will capitalize on Indian capabilities identified by EADS in various fields such as numerical simulation of complex physical systems, multi-disciplinary optimization, high-performance computing and radar technology.

During an India visit in mid-2006, former CEO Tom Enders had announced that EADS would open a technology campus in India. Next year, after EADS opened a legal subsidiary in India, it had further substantiated that the campus would have 2000 people, that would include its own employees and employees from Indian suppliers working on engineering design and IT.

While the Airbus Engineering Center India has since then ramped up to a 120-people operations—with plans to double in the next three years—there has been no further progress on the idea. However, a number of Indian companies are working for EADS. For hardware, HAL and ISRO's Antrix are its direct suppliers while TCS and Wipro work on the software side.

“A campus is a good idea and what we are doing today is a step towards that,” aid Dr. Jean Botti, EADS Chief Technical Officer (CTO). However, he did not commit on any numbers or the model—whether there is plans to physically bring together supplier employees.

The Airbus Engineering Center that works on non-specific design work, however, include a small number of supplier employees co-located there including from companies like HCL and Quest Global, according to industry sources.

“How the research grows is a factor of how the business environment dictates in a region,” said Botti, clarifying that business environment means both local sales as well as the research incentives offered by a particular country in a specific area. He gave examples of Singapore and England which have offered similar incentives. “However, I must clarify that all these centers, including the India center, are part of our network,” he said, adding, “We do not want to create silos.”