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Focused at discussing issues, challenges and solutions to foster interoperability, the Conclave drew participation from leading academicians, bureaucrats and industry professionals including Dr D B Phatak, Professor, IIT Bombay, R Chandrashekhar, Additional Secretary (E-Governance), Department of Information Technology, Govt of India, Nandan Nilekani, Co-Chairman, Infosys and Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft .

To ensure enhanced customer productivity in the increasingly heterogeneous technology environment. Microsoft has been leading the interoperability initiative and ensuring different technologies are able to talk to each other.

icrosoft’s four pronged strategy in this direction encompasses accomplishing interoperability through the explicit design of interoperable products, through working with partners, customers, and competitors, licensing IP and working with industry to create standards. The company has been consistently engaging with the ecosystem to promote interoperability and has rolled out several initiatives globally and in India in partnership with academia as well as customers and partners.

Co-located at the Microsoft Technical Centre in Bangalore, the Interoperability lab will enable customers envision and test interoperable solutions across infrastructure, application and management layers. The facility will encompass all benefits of the technical centre which include access to world class infrastructure, experts and Open Source Lab in Redmond. Under the Open Source Technology Program Microsoft also announced signing of MoUs with IIT-Kanpur, IIT Guwahati, IIIT Hyderabad and IIIT Bangalore.

“Interoperability is as critical a challenge as security and reliability to the health of an organization’s IT environment. With open dialogue and on ground work with the industry and academia we hope to collectively address this emerging and important issue”, said Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India.

“Initiatives like the Interoperability lab and the Open Source Technology program are significant milestones in our efforts to collaborate with the eco system to promote a community development approach and create innovative products that are inherently interoperable,” he added.

The Interoperability Lab will showcase, envision and build interoperability solutions for specific heterogeneous technology scenarios like cross platform rich web application and line of business application integration, virtualisation and management of heterogeneous platforms. The lab will be equipped with access to state-of-art computing and office infrastructure and Microsoft and Open Source Software to develop and test Interoperable solutions.

The Open Source Technology Program encourages student projects across diverse research areas such as Interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms, Mobile and embedded devices applications, Web and database applications on Windows, High performance computing applications etc. Further it will provide educational research grants to faculty and scholarships to students. Microsoft will encourage students to follow an open source community engagement model through Codeplex and port25.technet.com. As part of the program, students will also get guidance from Expert Advisory Council comprising of eminent members of the academic community. (ANI)