SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. is further expanding its presence in India with the planned January opening in Bangalore of its sixth research center.
The researchers in India will focus on ways to create, store and search information in multiple languages, technology for use in emerging markets and other specialties, Microsoft said Tuesday.
Microsoft already operates research campuses in Beijing; Cambridge, England; Redmond; San Francisco; and Silicon Valley.
Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president in charge of Microsoft Research, said the company decided to add an Indian campus to take advantage of the computer science students coming out of universities there.
The Microsoft Research campuses, modeled after academic research facilities, do work that is relevant to Microsoft’s product lineup, such as security or search technology. Products including the TabletPC have come out of the research arm.
But researchers also are encouraged to work on far-flung ideas that may never turn into profitable products, such as tools for developing HIV vaccines.
The Bangladore center will be headed by P. Anandan, previously a senior researcher at Microsoft’s Redmond campus. Anandan, a native of India, said in a statement that the country’s many languages, plus the fact that most of its more than 1 billion residents have no Internet access, make it a good backdrop for researching some of computer science’s most challenging problems.
The announcement comes just two weeks after Microsoft opened an office in Hyderabad, 340 miles north of Bangalore, and stepped up plans to hire more programmers in India. The new Hyderabad campus, its largest outside the United States, will eventually employ 3,000 programmers.
Microsoft already has offices in Bangalore for such functions as product support and sales, Rashid said.
Microsoft is one of dozens of American technology companies to set up facilities in India, taking advantage of the country’s vast pool of skilled workers who can be hired for a fraction of the cost of those in the United States.
Matt Rosoff, an analyst with the independent research company Directions on Microsoft, said the research facility shouldn’t raise fears that Microsoft will begin outsourcing key product work to India, resulting in lost jobs here.
“I think the research facilities are additive. They’re not replacing (jobs) in Redmond,” he said.
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