MANHASSET, NY -- Microsoft and the Skolkovo Foundation signed an agreement on the creation of Microsoft’s Research and Development Center at the Skolkovo technopark to cooperate on Cloud architectures.
Conor Lenihan, Skolkovo Foundation Vice President for international partnership development and Kirill Tatarinov, President of Microsoft Business Solutions signed an agreement on Monday May 21.
"Microsoft is one of the strategic partners of Skolkovo. The huge international experience and expertise of the company make a significant contribution to the development of the Russian IT industry and the country’s economy as a whole", said Conor Lenihan, in a statement.
Microsoft will use results from the Skolkovo design center for gloabl application of technologies for its Cloud platform in addition to Microsoft's stable of products.
The research center will create a new architecture for Microsoft Dynamics that meets requirements and demands of different countries around the world.
The announcement does not stipulate specific investment money to be used at Skolkovo, only to say "Microsoft plans to invest tens of millions of dollars into the program, contributing to the development of the IT industry and innovation economy as a whole."
Microsoft R&D center in Skolkovo is planning to involve over 100 IT specialists and researchers by 2015. In addition, the center will serve as the basis for joint applied research and development with experts from Microsoft worldwide.
The center will also cooperate with the Skolkovo Open University (OpUS) and the University of Science and Technology (Skolkovo Tech), and other leading Russian higher educational establishments.
"Russia is one of the strategically important countries in the world arena and is a center of research and development activity and innovation," said Kirill Tatarinov, President of Microsoft Business Solutions," in a statement. "This is a new page of our cooperation and joint research and development activities in Russia, which will help unlock the huge potential of Russian developers in the creation of top-level software products."
Plans to locate the Microsoft development center in Skolkovo were unveiled on November 1, 2010 at a meeting of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer with Viktor Vekselberg, president of Skolkovo.
Cloud Numerics, the first Cloud projects created by engineers from the Russian team of Microsoft developers, has been released this spring. Tailored to be used in the Cloud it will be available to research and commercial organizations.
This past April Microsoft presented Cloud Numerics to Skolkovo students and Russian startups. Skolkovo residents started to use the technology with free access to Windows Azure resources, a library for application simulation.
The IT cluster at Skolkovo at last count has more than 142 companies participating.