Microsoft plans R&D arm in Bangalore

April 01, 2010 15:42 IST

Microsoft India R and D, which currently has a development centre in Hyderabad, announced the expansion of its activities to Bangalore on Thursday.

"It will initially have 200 plus employees, vast majority of whom would transition to Microsoft from Yahoo! as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo! Search alliance", Satya Nadella, senior vice president, R and D, Online Services Division, Microsoft told reporters in Bangalore.
"The Bangalore centre joins Hyderabad as one of the core hubs of development and research for OSD. The innovations from our Hyderabad team are already having significant impact on our US, UK, Canada, Australia and India products. The combined skills and talent of our existing OSD team at Hyderabad and the Yahoo! employees who join us now in Bangalore will enhance India's contribution to our OSD innovation charter inclusive of Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Ad Centre", he said.
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On MSN Bing, Microsoft's new redesigned web search engine, he said it had received some great early momentum in the US and efforts are on to develop some India specific features in offering local content.
This offering would be in terms of harvesting structured information like local events happening in a city and throw up structured results. It would also be working with local content developers for this, he said.
Both Hyderabad and Bangalore centres will grow and both would have top talents contributing to OSD, he said.
On the contribution of Microsoft India team, Microsoft India R&D MD Srini Koppolu said the team had been contributing in terms af adding core algo relevance, developing structured data and building page search advertising technology.

Source: http://business.rediff.com/report/2010/apr/01/tech-microsoft-plans-research-arm-in-bangalore.htm