Microsoft Corp.'s research lab in India has teamed up with Indian outsourcer, Infosys Technologies Ltd., to research issues in software engineering.

The focus of the new collaboration is not on generating intellectual property (IP) but on solving problems in the area of software engineering, Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, said Tuesday. Most of the joint research will be published and put in the public domain to benefit the software development community, said Rashid, who did not rule out that certain IP would be created and shared by the two companies.

Doing research with Infosys on software engineering is interesting for Microsoft Research because of Infosys’ experience with large and complex projects, said Padmanabhan Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research Lab India Pvt. Ltd. in Bangalore. "Infosys works on a large number of large, enterprise software projects for a variety of clients, and that experience is useful when we do research in software engineering," he added.

Microsoft Research Lab India already has a group, called Rigorous Software Engineering (RSE), that is doing research in the area of software engineering. Infosys of Bangalore set up its Software Engineering and Technology Labs (SET Labs) in 2000. As an IT services company, with around 60,000 staff involved in various aspects of software engineering, Infosys is researching new ways to build very complex systems as productively as possible, said Subrahmanyam Goparaju, vice president at Infosys.

Infosys and Microsoft Research India have already identified some areas for their joint research. The companies will, for example, work on tools and methodologies in the area of systems integration, said Sriram K. Rajamani, research manager at Microsoft Research Lab India, who heads the RSE group. Another area identified for research is to be build tools to measure the performance of enterprise software even before it is built, he added.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.