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V. Rishi Kumar

HYDERABAD, May 17

THE Microsoft Indian Development Centre, part of global major Microsoft Corporation, based at Cyber Towers in Hyderabad, has developed a versatile product that facilitates seamless integration of Windows with Unix services.

The Product Unit Manager, Microsoft India Development Centre (MIDC), Mr Amit Chatterjee, told Business Line, ``what we have achieved from Hyderabad is extremely creditable as enterprises will be able to comfortably interface in an Unix environment and gradually scale up their operations without disruption.''

``We started in a humble way with SFU (Services for Unix) version 1.0 from Hyderabad in 1999 and upgraded to SFU 2.0 in April 2000. And SFU 3.0 is a huge release, which adds interoperability through a simplified procedure. The uniqueness of this product is that it is completely developed at MIDC from design, technology, planning for building features and testing with marketing and related support from Redmond,'' he said.

Another important aspect this product has featured is building NAS (network attached storage) feature into the system and this facilitates data-related solutions. This enables access of data.

Host of OEMs including Dell, Compaq are bundling this since interoperability is a key feature along with the network attached storage. This market had grown from about 8 per cent to 30 per cent, he said.

``We have developed an excellent team of about 50 engineers who have been associated with the product. Already, we have initiated work on the version 4.0 of the product and this may also possibly see a release of an earlier offering in the form of version 3.5,'' he added.

Looking at the NAS space, where performance is key to access data-related information, several verticals including financials and manufacturing will be able to relate to this product comfortably without having to rework processes and systems. .

``The product is absolutely relevant even in India. We need to work in India with our marketing teams to study and analyse the potential to work with enterprises and in the Government environment. The product opens up a pathway for migration and makes it easy for enterprises,'' he said.

As enterprises seek to expand their operations and build features without disrupting their businesses, issues like data sharing including file management, network, CAD/AM, system administration, account management can be handled without difficulty.

While building security features, which is a key issue, the product offers ideal way towards application migration, which is very distinct. Interestingly, all this can be through a single password without hassles, he said.

``As the enterprises are heterogeneous in nature, a lot of organisation use Unix systems. Since total cost of ownership is a key issue, they cannot migrate and change to newer environment. In order to address this with minimum investment on technology, the best way is to leverage the benefits of this product which has built migration capability into it,'' Mr Chatterjee said.

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