GENIVI Membership Continues Strong Growth

LUDWIGSBURG, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The GENIVI Alliance, an industry association driving the development and adoption of an open In-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform, today announced continued expansion of its membership with new members from across the industry. The alliance expansion to 21 members successfully eliminates any single dependency in the new open IVI supply chain.

“These leading companies will significantly add to the GENIVI platform’s development of the non-differentiating elements of the IVI stack, and expand the commercial offerings available to the IVI industry.”

The first new Charter member to join since launch in March, XS Embedded, a Harman International company and a fully-owned subsidiary of Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH, will participate with the initial founding members of the GENIVI Alliance (BMW Group, Delphi, GM, Intel, Magneti-Marelli, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Visteon, and Wind River). Additionally, KPIT Cummins, and Mocean Labs have joined GENIVI Alliance as Core Members enabling them to participate in technical working groups contributing to broad support of specifications and code.

“The continued growth in GENIVI Alliance’s membership underscores the strength in GENIVI’s open source approach to innovation and flexibility in commercialization options,” said Graham Smethurst, GENIVI president. “These leading companies will significantly add to the GENIVI platform’s development of the non-differentiating elements of the IVI stack, and expand the commercial offerings available to the IVI industry.”

“XS Embedded will leverage the GENIVI reference platform as it is being developed,” said Dr. Teichner, Managing Director of XS Embedded and CTO of Harman Becker Automotive Systems GmbH. “As the leading provider of premium infotainment solutions, we have always supported open platform development. This strategy aligns with our goal to focus our innovation on higher level features and applications that help drive the industry as a whole forward.”

“KPIT Cummins sees a perfect alignment between its own and GENIVI’s vision of a reusable and scalable platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) products,” noted Anup Sable, VP, Automotive Line of Business of KPIT Cummins. “GENIVI’s collaborative development approach allows infotainment solution providers such as KPIT Cummins to create unique and differentiated IVI products and services that will facilitate reusability, thus reducing time to market and cost.”“It is a tremendous opportunity to contribute to the momentum that GENIVI is gaining and to see that the initial investment from us and our partners in open source goes hand in hand with the vision of the GENIVI platform and its powerful use of open source software, which will speed up time to market and improve software quality,” says Anders Björkenbo, CEO of Mocean Labs.

At the 13th International Advances in Automotive Electronics Conference taking place in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Graham Smethurst, GENIVI President, and Gerulf Kinkelin, GENIVI Director, will present “The Open Infotainment Platform for the Automotive Industry” on 16 July, 2009.

For more information, or to become a GENIVI member, visit www.genivi.org/.

About GENIVI Alliance

GENIVI Alliance is a non-profit industry association whose mission is to drive the broad adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open source development platform. GENIVI will accomplish this by aligning requirements, delivering reference implementations, offering certification programs and fostering a vibrant open source IVI community. GENIVI is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. www.genivi.org.

About Harman Becker Automotive Systems

Harman Becker Automotive Systems is the automotive division of Harman International Industries, Incorporated (www.harman.com). Harman Becker provides leading-edge entertainment, information and communication systems for the automotive industry and the aftermarket. Harman International designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment products for the automotive, consumer and professional markets. Harman International maintains a strong presence in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and employs around 11,000 people worldwide. The Harman International family of brands includes internationally renowned brands such as AKG^®, Audioaccess^®, Becker^®, BSS^®, Crown^®, dbx^®, DigiTech^®, DOD^®, Harman Kardon^®, Infinity^®, JBL^®, Lexicon^®, Mark Levinson^®, Revel^®, QNX^®, Soundcraft^® and Studer^®. The company's shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the code "HAR."