Interview: Microsoft Euro chief touts research center

Microsoft Corp. officially opened its European Microsoft Innovation Centre (EMIC) in Aachen, Germany on Monday. IDG News Service spoke to Microsoft’s chief executive for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Jean-Philippe Courtois, on Friday about the company’s plans.

EMIC, which was first announced in early 2003, will focus on collaborative research with other technology companies and also with local academic institutions, Courtois said. The center’s staff will take part in research projects sponsored by the European Commission (EC) and European national governments, he said.

In setting up the center, Microsoft said it is partly responding to the EC’s call for private investment to help Europe achieve the “Lisbon agenda”: to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.

IDG News Service: Why has it taken so long, when you first planned to launch the center in May 2003?

Jean-Philippe Courtois: It’s true it was somewhat pre-announced but the reality is that, because it’s all about collaboration with other European companies, universities and research institutions, it takes time. The process is lengthy — you start bidding for an EU (European Union) project and it takes six to nine months for a response. And it also takes time to set up the team. The time has been well used.

IDGNS: Why do you need another research center, when you already have centers in Cambridge, England, and Redmond?

Courtois: It’s another dimension of research and development. At Cambridge we have 80 top notch researchers doing pure research, very advanced research. We have another research center near Copenhagen, formerly the Navision center, where we have 700 people. But EMIC is doing applied research. It’s using existing technology and the results will be seen sooner than in the other centers, in two or three years.

The other aspect that’s very different is that we are doing collaborative projects. Each project involves six or even a dozen companies and universities working together to deliver innovative technologies that can be used across Europe. For us, this is very new. We’ve never been involved in these sorts of collaborative projects, inside or outside Europe. I was the sponsor for this — I pushed for it because I thought it would be good for the company to bring in more innovation.

IDGNS: What is the relationship with the EC in the center? Does it fund and drive what you research?

Courtois: The Commission is not putting in money, we are funding the research center. But whenever we get selected in a bid, we get a portion of the cost back from the EU, as do other companies involved. So 30 percent to 50 percent of the cost is funded by the EU. It’s not about getting subsidies but about being part of a team working on European projects.

IDGNS: What’s the annual budget of the center?

Courtois: We’re not releasing numbers but we have 20 people there and it’s expanding.

IDGNS: What’s it like to work with one side of the EC while fighting with it on the other side?

Courtois: At the country level, we’re doing work with real people. The EC is a big institution with many different entities and while we’re not in complete agreement with the competitive authorities, in reality we have good partnerships with other parts of the EC.

IDGNS: How does the research focus in Europe differ to elsewhere in the world?

Courtois: Research is based on the people involved and their backgrounds. You hire people and they come with their own projects, although we put management in to try to manage and channel that. There is a strong programming competency (in Europe), with the next generation of programming models being developed, and also work on the user interface. EMIC will focus on security and privacy, Web services, and wireless technology.

IDGNS: Moving to the broader European picture, how do you see the European market changing when new countries join the EU next month?

Courtois: We see it in a very positive way. Those countries have very strong economies overall, some growing faster than other countries in the EU. We’ve been investing for 12 years in those countries and seen very strong growth in innovation and IT. One aspect is the need for IT in government in those countries and we have been partnering with governments in Eastern Europe.

IDGNS: How do you plan to persuade them not to go open source?

Courtois: That’s a long debate! We’ve had to face this for the past few years. There’s been a lot of hype but I think people are coming back to reality. Anyone in charge of a big company is looking at costs, and there have been a lot of studies showing that the total cost of ownership is the same or even lower with Windows compared to Linux.

I had a meeting with the mayor of Riga, in Latvia, and they had done a pretty deep study into the open source and Windows platforms, and that showed they were better off with Windows.

IDGNS: Do you plan to work with other national user groups in Europe, as you have done with CIGREF (Club Informatiques des Grandes Entreprises Francaises) in France?

Courtois: There aren’t many formalized user groups in Europe. Where they exist we do try to be in contact. CIGREF is the most structured and the most representative, because it covers most of the big enterprises. We would love to have more CIGREFs! Not that it’s always easy every day but it’s good to have direct dialogue.