Microsoft to invest $1.7 B in India
By agencies   |   Wednesday, 07 December 2005, 20:30 IST
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NEW DELHI: The world’s largest software maker Microsoft Corp, plans to invest more than $1.7 billion in India, joining other multinationals expanding operations in the fast-growing economy. Microsoft's investment plans follow fellow American company Intel's announcement Monday to invest $1.1 billion in the medium term in its Indian operations, including setting up a venture fund to take stakes in local start-ups. In October, Cisco Systems Inc said it plans to invest $1.1 billion in India over the next three years and triple its staff in the country. The company also announced its plans to set up an ‘Innovation Center’ in Bangalore by January 2006, as a part of a proposed network of 90 centers across the world. The Microsoft Corporate Vice-President (Worldwide Public Sector), Gerri Elliott, said the Microsoft Innovation Centers (MICs) would offer facilities and resources for students, professional developers, architects, IT professionals and researchers. Hands-on labs and other programs would focus on technical and business skills development, and spur advances in 64 bit architecture, Windows Vista development and application design. These centers would run in partnership with local governments, academic institutions and industry and software vendors. However they did not disclose investment details and the number of employees likely to be hired for the Bangalore innovation center. Elliott said the new center would start off solo but Microsoft would rope in partners in the future. At present the company has 60 innovation centers worldwide, in places such as Brazil, Germany, Malaysia, China, Australia and Japan. The additional 30 centers would be located in countries such as Korea, South Africa and India, thus completing the global network. Besides, the company said it would also launch multilingual Windows XP Starter Edition supporting a variety of Indian languages and English in the first quarter of the next year. Currently the starter edition is Hindi and Tamil. “The English version of the operating system will be only for India,” she added.

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