Thursday, 31 August , 2006, 08:08 Hyderabad: Microsoft Corporation plans to step up its R&D operations out of India and expand activity across six functional divisions in India.
The company is working towards establishing a separate centre of excellence for its to-be-launched Vista operating system that would work on integration of Vista OS with other systems in a technology environment while also handling migration services.
Headcount
The Managing Director of Microsoft India Development Centre, Srini Koppolu, said that the company's India Development Centre at Hyderabad currently employs about 1,200 people and added about 500 of them last year. Going by the current rate, it could potentially add 500 more during the year.
Addressing newspersons after the inauguration of a 4-lakh-sq-ft facility by the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, in its 50-acre campus that could house about 3,000 people, Koppolu said that while it would not like to break up number additions team-wise, as per the company plan outlined it is proposed to increase India headcount from the current 4,000 people to 7,000 by 2009.
R&D centre
The India R&D centre has grown to be the largest outside Redmond. It now works on over 50 products and technologies for the global Microsoft portfolio, including the next-generation Vista OS.
As part of the Vista launch, Microsoft plans to deploy Beta version of Vista OS for over 60,000 employees of the company. .
To its R&D work in Hyderabad, the company has added two more divisions - Microsoft Global Delivery Centre India and Microsoft Global Services Centre India.