Visiting India, Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, announced plans for the company to invest $1.7bn in the country over the next four years, almost doubling its workforce with the addition of 3,000 new jobs.
Meanwhile Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat announced that that it had taken full control of its Red Hat India joint venture and invest $20m in the country over the next two-to-three years.
The Linux distributor’s Indian operation was set up in late 2000via a joint venture with Javed Tapia, who remains Red Hat director for Indian Subcontinent after Red Hat has acquired his 40% holding.
Red Hat said it would be investing in the country to both grow the adoption of open source software in India, while also making use of its technical talent pool to serve other geographies.
Meanwhile Microsoft is investing much of its $1.7bn in improving existing R&D capabilities. The company opened Microsoft Research Lab India Private Ltd in Bangalore earlier this year, with the initially task of investigating multilingual systems, technologies for emerging markets, geographical information systems, and sensor networks.
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