New R&D centre in Bangalore to fuel Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership

03rd April 2010
New R&D centre in Bangalore to fuel Microsoft-Yahoo search partnership
Microsoft's Satya Nadella soon after the announcement of the new MIDC centre and (inset) Srini Koppolu, MD, Microsoft Research India.

Hard on the heels of its alliance with Yahoo on search-related technologies, Microsoft has announced the setting up of a new development centre in Bangalore -- a decade and a year after it set up the India Development Centre in Hyderabad.

The new centre will consist predominantly of Yahoo employees, 200 of whom will form the core of the new group that will work on product development and applied research in Web Search and Online Advertising which will help the two players leverage each other’s strengths to create a formidable online search solution with sharpened advertising relevance.

Says Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Senior Vice-President, R&D, Online Services Division (OSD), “The Bangalore center 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 innovation charter inclusive of Microsoft Bing and Microsoft adCenter.” According to the Yahoo-MS agreement, Microsoft will provide the core search platform and Yahoo will build the experience interfaces on top of this. The two search engines Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing while remain separate offerings will share marketing and advertising efforts and offer advertisers a two fold opportunity.

Srini Koppolu, Corporate Vice-President and Managing Director, Microsoft India R&D, adds: “Over the last 11 years, we made significant R&D contributions to Microsoft from India, engineering several products that empower customers worldwide. Our development center has become the destination for the “best and the brightest” talent of India, and we are very excited to welcome on board the group of talented engineers from Yahoo! who will further strengthen our talent base. In Hyderabad, we will continue to grow our existing development efforts that are aligned to major Microsoft lines of business. In Bangalore, the initial focus would be on R&D in Search and Online Advertising technologies.”
Koppulu listed a number of products that have flown from the Hyderabad MIDC – including the Windows XP mode and mobile extensions of Windows 7; the Microsoft-SAP Duet product; half of Microsoft’s Customer Relations Management (CRM) solution; BizTalk for Server 2010; Data Protection Manager, the compact edition of SQL Server and the distributed caching technology, Velocity.

April 3 2010