The Hindu Business Line : MS India centre to focus on emerging markets

New centre: The new Microsoft India Development Centre in Cyberabad opened on Tuesday on the occasion of the company completing 10 years in India. -

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Hyderabad, Aug 12 As Microsoft India Development Centre (MIDC) here, the largest research and development centre outside US for Microsoft, completes 10 patent-filled years, it embarks on a new R&D strategy with focus on emerging markets.

This change in approach is aimed at securing insight into local markets and services. The next billion customers could potentially be a different set of PC and mobile phone users, who could access several Microsoft software features and services.

In the past, R&D was Redmond-centric. The MIDC is now looking at collaborations and contributions from local developers with focus on emerging markets.

India has the second largest developer network for Microsoft and offers over 5,000 live projects. This will enable researchers to design and develop new products to meet specific needs in local markets, according to Mr S. Somasegar, Senior Vice-President, Developer Division, Microsoft.

Products at Microsoft are now being developed in a collaborative manner – be it at Redmond, Microsoft headquarters, or India or in other development centres located at China, Europe, Israel and Canada. This move has made it a lot more exciting as inputs come from many markets and their needs too are some times different, Mr Somasegar said.

IP creation

The Corporate Vice-President and Managing Director of MIDC, Mr Srini Koppolu, who founded the Hyderabad centre with a dozen researchers in 1998, said MIDC had so far filed for over 220 patents, and continues to do a lot of intellectual property creation.

With 1,500 researchers, MIDC has handled several large product development mandates and incubated over 70 projects leading to some global products which were either developed collaboratively or through researchers in India, Mr Koppolu said.

Way forward

Addressing a press conference, Mr Somasegar said the focus going forward will be on areas such as mobile phones. With 2.4 billion mobile phone users and 1.1 billion PC users, the next billion of connected users is not far off. Therefore, research focus will be on reaching out services to them.

The company has already launched Silverlight to help access TV content on different devices.

Another area of focus will be developer tools and testing related to products. Windows Live and related areas of search is a big project for MIDC.

After taking part in the inaugural session of the third block in MIDC campus, the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, said the State IT exports as a part of India’s overall IT exports had gone up from eight per cent in 2003-2004 to 15 per cent in 2007-2008 at about Rs 26,000 crore.