BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft India today announced expansion of its development activities in Bangalore. The new Bangalore R&D Center will have 200 plus head count and will be the second development center of the software giant in India. A vast majority of whom would be on transition to Microsoft from Yahoo as part of the Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance.

The new development center will have a dedicated team for online services of Microsoft whose priority for the next 12 months will be to build India unique features on the online platform, said Satya Nadella, senior vice-president, R&D, Online Services Division, Microsoft said here on Thursday.

Nadella said that product development and Applied Research in the cutting-edge areas of Web search and online advertising will be the focus of the Bangalore team.

“We are confident that once the transition is completed, the companies’ unified search marketplace will deliver even greater and improved innovation for consumers, better volume and efficiency for advertisers and better monetization opportunities for web publishers,” he added.

In reply to a query on the future of the two search engines Nadella made it clear that Yahoo Search and Bing will remain as different search engines. The alliance between the two companies will result in richer user experience for the users.

Srini Koppolu, corporate vice-president and managing director, Microsoft India R&D, said, “Over the last 11 years, we made significant R&D contributions to Microsoft from India, engineering several products that empower customers worldwide.

“Our development center has become the destination for the 'best and the brightest' talent of India, and we are very excited to welcome on board the group of talented engineers from Yahoo! who will further strengthen our talent base. In Hyderabad, we will continue to grow our existing development efforts that are aligned to Microsoft's lines of business,” he added.