Ballmer opens Microsoft's Indian campus

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has officially opened the first phase of its new research and development campus in the Indian city of Hyderabad, as exclusively revealed by silicon.com back in May.

The 40-acre campus, just outside the high-tech hub of Hyderabad in Manikonda, will house 800 staff currently employed by Microsoft in Hyderabad and Ballmer said the company expects to hire hundreds more over the next 12 months.

Microsoft's new campus is software giant's largest outside of Redmond, Washington, and represents a significant scaling up of its activities in India, where software development costs are much lower than in western countries.

Hyderabad is one of the Indian cities trying to challenge the dominance of Bangalore, offering significant subsidies for IT firms to locate there, while earlier this year Bangalore even claimed it was on the verge of overtaking Silicon Valley as the biggest IT employment region on the world on the back of the rise in offshoring.

On silicon.com's fact-finding trip to India in April we also visited Computer Associates' fledgling operation in the Hi-Tec City business park and saw the site of a new 600,000 square foot Oracle software development facility that will be ready in three years.