Date: 21/04/2009

Wipro buys enterprise mobile TV unit of Nokia

Wipro Technologies gets better to call it as an Indian Multi National Company (MNC) by acquiring business unit from Finland based world's number 1 mobile phone maker Nokia. The acquired enterprise mobile TV business unit of Nokia is designing enterprise side hardware and software to enable Television watching on cell-phones. It has 40 engineers developing digital DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld) based server platform to stream broadcasted digital video/audio to handheld gadgets.

Nokia's reason for selling this business is, Nokia wanted to focus on the consumer side of things, the mobile TV client in its mobile phones and such handhelds, rather than on the business-to-business side.

Since from 1999, Wipro is active in consumer electronics domain. Wipro is delivering design services to develop semiconductor devices, equipments and embedded software for digital audio and video streaming on portable and fixed entertainment devices. Wipro's Consumer Electronics Group (CEG) engages with semiconductor, consumer product and service provider companies in providing them both hardware and software solutions and services at different stages of consumer product development process.

Wipro has provided solutions for products like set-top boxes, digital TVs, High Definition TVs (HDTV), portable media players, digital cameras, DVD players and etc. It has built quite a number of re-usable hardware and software components and IPs in digital TV middleware and next generation video systems. With this smart acquisition it might be stepping faster and deeper into product development from present end-to-end product designer to developing it's own brand of full product in consumer domain otherwise called convergence domain both for service providers and as well as consumers.

Wipro with its head office in Bangalore, India is an engineering conglomerate with its foot set both in traditional engineering and advanced IT area.