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Windows NT Services for Unix will be done entirely in India

Microsoft has dubbed the technology for this as the 'Windows NT Services for Unix'.

And the second version of these services is to be entirely developed by the Microsoft's India unit.

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"The second version of Windows NT Services for Unix is going to be completely developed in India," Srini Koppolu, general manager, Microsoft India (Research and Development) Private Limited, has been quoted as saying.

Hyderabad is the site of Microsoft's first full-fledged development centre outside its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Koppolu said the first version of the product released earlier this month was also developed partially by engineers in Hyderabad, where Microsoft's unit started work two months ago.

Windows NT and Unix are competing brands of operating systems that form the core platform for software that run computer networks.

Microsoft, whose operating systems run on more than 80 per cent of the world's personal computers, has been aggressively promoting NT to challenge Unix's traditional dominance among servers and is said to be making strong headway.

Koppolu said a major demand from Microsoft's corporate clients is to make NT and Unix computers work together.

"They don't want to have two copies of the same information, one based on NT and another based on Unix," he explained. "Whatever the operating system, Unix clients and NT clients must be able to access the information uniformly at a single point," he said.

The latest version of the product that links the two platforms is scheduled for release in the third quarter of 1999, soon after the latest version of Windows NT, according to Koppolu.

"We hope to release it two or three months after the release of NT 5.0, which is due in the second quarter of 1999."

Koppolu said part of the code for the first version of Windows NT Services for Unix was bought from Intergraph Inc and the rest has been developed internally by Microsoft.

"In the next version we are going to revamp it dramatically... performance-wise," Koppolu promised.

"Big corporations want interoperability. They agree that NT provides great performance but they are also worried about their Unix based clients. So the services for Unix products will help propel the sales of NT," he said.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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