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Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect of
Microsoft Corporation is scheduled to meet Tamil Nadu
Chief Minister J Jayalalitha to explore ways of co-operation
on e-governance and IT literacy among other issues.
This is Gates maiden visit to Chennai.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced its plane of scaling
up India operations by increasing the local headcount
by 3,000 over three to four years, taking the total
strength to 7,000.
Speaking at the CII-CEO forum, Microsoft Chairman and
Chief Software Architect said, "We depend on India
for manpower that is why we are scaling operations here.
We have 4,000 people today and we will be 7,000 over
the next three to four years. We are hiring as fast
as we can."
The percentage increase in employees would be the
highest in India, he said.
"They will play a key part in product development,
research and support services," Gates said.
Microsoft currently has three centres in the country
- India Development Centre at Hyderabad, an R&D
and Global Technical Support Centre in Bangalore.
Stating that applications for local use should be
done by local developers, he said that with regard to
handwriting and speech recognition software Microsoft
would work with local experts to make sure it applies
to all broadly used languages.
Gates was emphatically impressed with India's human
resource saying, "India has a fantastic pool of
software professionals... the world needs to benefit
from this. I never thought with so little product companies
software services sector will grow so strong as it has
grown here."
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