The Hindu Business Line : Giving shape to technology

THE Microsoft India Development Centre (MIDC) has expanded the mandate of research. Its Managing Director, Srini Koppolu, shares with eWorld the nature and scope of the work done at the Hyderabad centre. Excerpts:

During our recent visit to the centre, you talked about the next phase of growth. Please elaborate.

The Microsoft India Development Centre is the second development centre for Microsoft outside of the US.

It is a critical component of Microsoft's product development initiatives. Product development here began in August 1998 with a core group of 20 people.

It has now been scaled up into a force of 600 developers who are currently developing more than 35 different products and technologies.

While the first phase of development at the Hyderabad Centre was centred around Services for UNIX, and VJ# .NET, we are currently working on a range of products strategic to Microsoft's business goals.

The centre plays a significant role in bringing customers to Microsoft through products and technologies such as SFU (Services for Unix), VJ#.NET and OtoN.

It has also been making critical contributions to key Microsoft products such as Windows, MBS, TabletPC, MSN, and PocketPC.

Given that technology and product innovation lead to transformation within an enterprise, incubation activities at the centre are geared towards identifying and validating emerging technologies and products.

The incubation activities also involve prototyping and building business-centric value-propositions.

We have made significant progress in RFID (radio frequency identification) technology and Data Protection spaces based on this incubation model.

What have been the major achievements of this centre since its inception?

In the last seven years, the centre has achieved a lot of recognition both in the work it performs and the way it performs it.

It has been designed to mirror Microsoft's development efforts at Redmond.

The centre has released several key products in recent years, demonstrating its ability to conceptualise and develop products for millions of diverse sets of customers all over the world.

Driven by the vision to innovate, the teams here filed for 40 patents in 2004 and will be filing for an additional 70 patents in 2005.

Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 (SFU3.0), developed here, won the `Best System Integration Software' award at LinuxWorld Conference, held in New York.

The business value proposition for customers, based on an integrated platform approach, clinched the award for SFU3.0.

This centre, it has been reported, is assuming a larger role in Microsoft's plans. Please explain how this will happen.

The centre works on products strategic to Microsoft that get used by millions of customers, worldwide. It focuses on projects that are strategic, IP-sensitive and long-term-oriented.

Some of the key development initiatives here are: Data Protection Manager, RFID Platform Technologies, Office Mobile, Windows SFU, features of Longhorn, Visual Studio, Office Live Meeting and MS-CRM.

Our centre plays an important role in contributing to future innovations at Microsoft.

We are proud to be at the core of Microsoft's global development initiatives, playing a significant role in driving multiple businesses that are of strategic importance to all of Microsoft's product lines.

MIDC, Hyderabad, works closely with Redmond right from the initial planning stages of a project and is an integral part of the decision-making which shares the development work between the two centres. This is determined keeping in mind the talent pool available at both locations and ensures optimal utilisation of resources.

The centre is well integrated into key product families at Microsoft, with teams at Hyderabad serving as true extensions to project teams at Redmond.

The centre works on core product development with end-to-end responsibility on most of the products it develops, from concept to completion.

What are the new areas the Hyderabad centre expects to address, after Services for UNIX, and work on VS, and J Sharp, and lately on infrastructure-related issues?

The centre has identified two emerging areas to develop products: these are in RFID (radio frequency identification) and data storage areas.

RFID technology is being rapidly adopted by businesses, initially to automatically detect and track goods in supply chains.

Our team is developing a set of RFID software services to enable Microsoft's independent software vendor (ISV) partners to create real-time `track and trace' capabilities into their business applications.

Our vision is to create a rich set of hardware-agnostic and application-agnostic RFID services for the Windows platform, which customers can use to define, test and deploy easy-to-manage RFID solutions.

RFID will revolutionise the way organisations conduct business by connecting to sensor devices for better visibility and through access to line of business (LOB) data.

We are building platform technologies for connectivity between software systems and devices such as RFID readers, as well as backend applications.

The Hyderabad centre will house a `Centre of Excellence' in India on Data Protection and Storage Technologies.

The group at MIDC is developing solutions and technologies in the storage area, including Microsoft System Centre Data Protection Manager or DPM, which is part of the Microsoft System Centre Server software family.

This technology supports continuous disk-based backup and recovery on Windows Server-based networks.

This group is also working on storage tools and technologies for Microsoft's next generation operating system.

How big is MIDC now and what is the roadmap?

Currently, the centre houses 600 developers.

We have not based our hiring on the capacity of the centre, but we will continue to grow at a healthy pace.

We will continue to hire based on the wealth of talented, young, energetic and enthusiastic developers available in India.

India is an important part of Microsoft's global strategy and we are committed to support the growth of the industry in the future.

When Bill Gates visited India, he had announced a commitment of $50 million for the India centre. How is the progress now?

It will be difficult to quantify our present investment and breakdown on the investment into the facility.

Picture by Satish H

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

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