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As corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group (UCG), Anoop Gupta leads Microsoft’s client-server-service efforts to provide business communications solutions (e-mail, IM, VoIP, unified messaging, audio/video/Web conferencing) and platform components. His team is responsible for Microsoft Exchange Server, Speech Server, Office Communicator Server, Office Communicator products, Live Meeting and Exchange Hosted Services businesses.
The charter for UCG is to deliver on the "Unified Communications" vision, allowing people, teams and organizations to communicate simply and effectively while integrating seamlessly with their business applications and processes. Key aspects of the vision are:
Rich, presence-based, person-centric communications tools that make it easier and more likely that we successfully connect with people.
Integration of communications modalities (e-mail, IM, VoIP-telephony, SMS, audio/video/Web conferencing) into a seamless and intuitive experience, to be able to connect with and communicate with people in the best, most effective ways.
Communications capabilities contextually available within everyday applications (inside Office, portals, LOB applications), thus becoming an integral part of business processes.
Information agent software and services that allow us to remain connected to relevant people and in control despite overload of incoming communications.
Universal availability on PCs, phones and innovative mobile devices, at work/home/on-the-road, federated enterprise-consumer networks, and as on-premise and hosted service solutions.
Lower TCO for communications solutions by leveraging existing IT infrastructure and enhancing manageability and security for IT professionals.
An extensible UC platform that allows our partner ecosystem and developers to further build/extend Microsoft core offerings to meet customers' needs.
Before leading the Unified Communications Group, Gupta was technology assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman. In that role, Gupta helped define the company’s strategy for real-time collaboration. He also contributed to several initiatives related to Windows Vista, the next release of the Microsoft Windows operating system, then code-named "Longhorn." Gupta became Bill Gates’ technology assistant after working for four years at Microsoft Research, where he led the Collaboration and Multimedia Group. His team was responsible for development and transfer of many key technologies to product groups.
Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Gupta was a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University for 11 years. His research at Stanford spanned computer architecture, operating systems, programming languages, simulation and performance debugging tools, and parallel applications. He also co-led, with John Hennessy, the development of hardware and software for the Stanford DASH multiprocessor, a highly concurrent shared-memory parallel computer that had a large impact on the industry. At Stanford, Gupta also led the Virtual Classroom project, which explored compression and networking issues related to transmission of audio-video over the Internet and its applications in education. In 1995, Gupta used the seeds of the technology developed in that project to form VXtreme Inc., a provider of technologies for streaming audio-visual content over the Web, which Microsoft acquired in 1997.
Gupta has published more than 100 papers in major conferences and journals, including several that have won awards. He has contributed to more than 40 patents. With David Culler and Jaswinder Pal Singh, he co-authored the book "Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware-Software Approach" in 1998. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990, and he held the Robert N. Noyce Faculty Scholar Chair at Stanford for 1993 and 1994. Before joining Stanford in 1987, Gupta was on the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1986. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where he graduated, receiving the President’s Gold Medal in 1980. |
