The Hindu : Business : `Nobody does IT better'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 10, 2005

Business

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`Nobody does IT better'

Anand Parthasarathy

A national talent hunt to be organised in India in early 2006

BANGALORE: Nobody does IT better. The work you do is so state-of-the-art. And there are a phenomenal four lakhs of you out there in India, observed, Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, while addressing the assembled `techies' here. He went on to say that by this time next year, at least one budding Indian software programmer will be in Redmond, California, working on futuristic projects, alongside him, as one of his personal technical assistants. How? A national talent hunt to be organised in India early in 2006, among final and pre-final year technical students, will identify 20 young software wizards and enable them to work at Microsoft's India-based labs — with the best among them going to the company's U.S. headquarters to "Code for Bill'' (http://www.code4bill. com).

The development of a low cost computing platform "not just for the first one billion people of the world, but for the next five billion,'' would be a priority task for the company's Indian R&D centre, Mr. Gates added.

Polaris product

One of the products that he singled out for mention was the "Collect.Net'' tool created by Chennai-based Polaris Software Lab. Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the Microsoft event, Polaris CTO Koen van Den Brande said Collect.Net, a product of Indian ingenuity, that helped banks and financial institutions manage payment defaults, now had more customers worldwide than in India.

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