UK defense company BAE Systems has appointed its CIO, Dean McCumiskey as Managing Director of its operations in India.

BAE has formed two defense venture companies BAeHAL, a Bangalore-based software engineering joint venture with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (owned  by India’s Ministry of Defense)  and Defence Land Systems India in partnership with automaker Mahindra & Mahindra, which has about 20 employees.

Recent successes of BAE Systems in India include an $80 million contract for provision of spares and ground support equipment to the Indian Air Force to aid the BAE Hawk training aircraft operations. BAE is the supplier of the Hawk aircraft.

Mercedes Benz now has 650 engineers working at its Bangalore development center. The facility is dedicated to passenger cars, and it currently works in conjunction with Daimler’s German unit in many areas, including development of powertrains, according India General Manager (Product Homologation) Prakash Vermali. The company hired 250 tech staff in the last year and the center serves a global market.

Decades ago, the company had a collaboration with Tata Motors (then called Telco) to build trucks in Pune. In that city, Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Pvt. Ltd. (MBRDI), a 100% captive unit of Daimler AG, was established as a research institute with eight employees in 1996 and currently has a capacity of 367 employees. MBRDI is the largest Research and Development center of Daimler AG outside Germany and contributes in the areas of Computer Simulation (CAE), Design (CAD), Electrical/Electronics and IT-Services. Research and development engineers at MBRDI assess the performance and reliability of various sub-systems and contribute to product development in all the stages of the life-cycle.

Takeaway:   Neither language barriers, nor quality concerns hold back the best global companies, if they are determined and patient, from benefiting from India’s engineering talent.

India’s role in global R&D has increased steadily in the last decade. My colleauges and I have directly participated in educating and encouraging North American and European corporation to include India and China as part of their global R&D ecosystem, through the Amritt Global Innovation Practice. Our clients are working with universities, national labs, private product companies, small inventors, and with many of R&D specialists who offer global engineering services using technical labor from Asia. Virtually all of our work is confidential so we are unable to share many examples of our clients success on this blog.

Yahoo! Inc however is not our client; The India Expert can report that its India R&D center’s contribution to intellectual property (IP) filed by Yahoo globally has increased to almost one-third the past two years, from 10-12% previously. While the company setup its Bangalore facility in 2000, Shouvick Mukherjee, vice-president of Yahoo India R&D, says innovation and product development from India have now started adding to the company’s overall revenues. “The major differentiator  is the responsibility of handling end-to-end products that we have compared to any other R&D center in India,” he claimed.

For example, Yahoos run an ad exchange a for which a product called Predict was developed in Bangalore. This product forecasts which online advertisement will get what level of click. This fundamentally improved the return on investment for advertisers, according to Mukherjee.  Another example is an internal platform product codenamed  Helion, which made it possible to launch multiple websites in parallel.

Yahoo has used a captive center model, primarily because most of its users are located outside the USA “There are companies that are outsourcing work and Yahoo is not in those section of companies. More than 50% of our user base is outside the US. And hence, it is very important for Yahoo to be global in its R&D” says Mukherjee.

In the United States, Yahoo has been under revenue and stock market pressure and reduced its workforce by 4% in an across the board cut in December , after prolonged rumors of a 10-20% cut focused largely on Blake Irving’s product development organization.

Only a few global companies have achieved a third of of R&D coming out of India and many companies don’t need to aspire to that goal. But it is valuable for all of us who struggle with running a global engineering organization to note that some have crossed this threshold.And its important to remember that the Yahoo approach of a captive center driven by market need is only one of many ways to succeed in India.

California-based Juniper Networks is planning a major expansion to its research and development center in Bangalore, India. The company will add 750 seats and 450 equipment racks at a new site (Prestige Exora Business Park) in Bangalore over the next two years. The company currently has 1,800 staff members and 300 employees of development partners located in Bangalore.

Its operations in India are responsible for a full spectrum of activities including hardware and software development, test engineering, field trials, program management, quality assurance, technical documentation and product line management. It also provides 12-hour-a-day global customer support covering all Juniper products and operates a Finance Shared Services Center, which delivers functions to Juniper Finance organizations across the world.

“This expansion reflects our ongoing commitment to increasing the depth of experience and expertise in the India region, which is becoming increasingly important not just as a source of engineering talent but also as a fast-growing market for Juniper Networks,” said Sridhar Sarathy, managing director of IEC at Juniper Networks.

Cardiac Science of Bothell, Washington  has agreed to be acquired for $2.30 per share by a medical equipment company based in Bangalore, India. The all-cash deal represents a 10 percent premium to Monday’s closing price of Cardiac Science shares, the companies said Tuesday.

Opto Circuits (India) Limited of Bangalore, which will pay $54.6 million for Cardiac Science, is a developer and marketer of healthcare equipment including pulse oximeters, patient monitoring systems, sensors, digital thermometers, anesthesia and respiratory care equipment, and stents. It reported revenues of $243 million in the latest fiscal year, and sells primarily in the US, Europe and South East Asia. Opto Circuits will fund the purchase through cash on hand and lines of credit.

Opto Circuits Chairman and Managing Director Vinod Ramnani said the deal helps his company venture into the noninvasive diagnostic monitoring and “high-growth” automated external-defibrillation markets.  “This transaction is expected to open many new global markets for Cardiac Science’s products and will greatly enhance Opto Circuits’ product offering and presence in the United States,” Ramnani asserted.

While companies from India are getting ambitious about M&A in the West, they continue to be value-seekers as we see in this deal to buy a distressed medical device company. Earlier this year, the company agreed to replace 24,000 AEDs for U.S. medical facilities and emergency services under a revised recall plan the company has negotiated with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  So don’t expect a wave of such buyouts in the next quarter.