Microsoft plans to unveil low-cost solutions

Global software major Microsoft's India Development Centre (MSIDC) is exploring emerging markets, especially India, to introduce low-cost and relevant solutions.

"We are in the process of drawing up a framework," said Srini Koppolu, vice-president & managing director, Microsoft India (R&D). However, he said before coming up with a concrete plan, the company was deliberating on issues such as high mobile usage and low PC penetration in the country.

"Though the country has a large mobile subscriber base, it is to be ascertained as to what percentage of this actually use the value-added services on mobile," said Koppolu.

MSIDC is no stranger to innovative thinking. Having filed around 180 product patents over the last two years, it is the second largest development centre for Microsoft outside the US, and a critical component of Microsoft's product development initiatives.

Koppolu said India was becoming a major hub for Microsoft's innovations. Set up in 1998, one-fourth of MSIDC's engineers worked on Windows Vista (the latest operating system from the Microsoft stable).

It has also established itself as a mobility centre of excellence having full responsibility for Office Communicator Mobile, SQL Mobile (recently renamed SQL Everywhere), Office Mobile and Visual Studio for Devices.

The Microsoft Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) platform, now under development at Hyderabad, was also successfully incubated by MSIDC.

"The India team has been working on this for the last two years. We are working on standards which will enable the flow from RFID readers to the servers and the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Towards this end, we are partnering with Intel and other players," said Koppolu, adding that the drive should eventually reduce the cost of the RFID reader substantially.

MSIDC has a strong team of 1,300 people, and Koppolu said the team would be further strenghtened. The team's success stories include Microsoft Dynamics Snap that was fully developed at MSIDC within a period of six months.

The Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile (CoMo) is the most recent product developed and is aimed at providing integration of mobile applications with enterprise-grade, real time collaboration such as secure instant messaging (IM), presence awareness and integrated voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephony.

Similarly, data protection management is a brand new product from MSIDC, and the team is working on solutions to protect enterprises, critical servers etc.