Microsoft has announced two new initiatives at the Microsoft Interoperability Conclave held in Bangalore today. The two initiatives include – Microsoft's first Interoperability Lab in India, designed to help customers envision and build solutions which are interoperable; Open Source Technology Programme designed to further open source research and development of open source applications on the Windows platform in collaboration with leading engineering institutes in the country.

"Interoperability is as critical a challenge as security and reliability to the health of an organisation'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 computing and office infrastructure and Microsoft and Open Source Software to develop and test Interoperable solutions.

Under the Open Source Technology Programme, Microsoft also announced signing of MoUs with IIT-Kanpur, IIT Guwahati, IIIT Hyderabad and IIIT Bangalore. The Programme 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.