The Hindu Business Line : Microsoft partners tech institutes

Hyderabad, March 6 Microsoft Corporation in India is investing significantly in collaborative development to bring about interoperability between Microsoft and open source platforms.

To drive this collaborative development, Microsoft India has partnered with Indian Institutes of Technology, Kanpur and Delhi; Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology; BITS-Pilani and International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad, and a few other major institutions and is pursuing over 8 projects for collaborative development.

The Microsoft India Platform Strategist, Mr Radhesh Balakrishnan, said that the projects are not just academia-oriented and may emerge as either products or tools while empowering engineering students to be in tune with the current day technology environment.

Mr Balakrishnan told Business Line, “Microsoft has provided educational research grants and has established an Expert Advisory Council to provide guidance on an ongoing basis. This is in addition to tools and stipends. We expect some of these projects to come up with innovative solutions.”

This is part of Microsoft’s initiative to bring about interoperability, that is help connect to different technology platforms and disparate technology systems seamlessly. The research drive seeks to bring about trustworthy computing, making it easier for an end user. The projects cover high performance computing, mobile applications where the thrust is on location-based solutions. Microsoft does not mandate projects but provide directional guidance. IIT-Kanpur is working on mobile location-based services which are important to an Indian user.

For instance, one project deals with mobile traffic monitoring and navigation. While Microsoft does not put any specific deadline to the projects, the mandate for development continues where researchers are engaged in developing rich media applications for mobile phones.

Alongside this, the Scholar versus Scholar programme engaged over 250 institutions in high performance computing (HPC) research of open source applications on Windows Compute Cluster Server.

Asked about the ongoing debate on document standards, Mr Balakrishnan said “this is just one element of focus for the company. By taking a collaborative approach to development, while involving open source people, we have broadened the area of development. We expect to partner with more institutions on an ongoing basis with more projects.”

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