Microsoft Open Technologies

Building & Promoting Open Source

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., (MS Open Tech) is a wholly owned subsidiary of [Microsoft Corporation](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/microsoft) to advance Microsoft’s investment in openness including interoperability, open standards and open source. At MS Open Tech, they focus on providing their customers with even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together in heterogeneous environments, because they’re convinced that openness is good for their customers, good for the community and good for their business. They’re a diverse team of engineers, standards professionals and technical evangelists who are experienced and passionate in working with an equally diverse set of technologies from Microsoft and others. Every day, they are powering interoperability and opportunity across the IT community of developers, partners, customers and competitors. They build open source code. They create interoperability bridges. They contribute open standards specs. They work with a variety of standards organizations such as: W3C, IETF, OASIS, Ecma, DMTF, and open source communities including: JQuery, MongoDB, Apache Cordova, Redis, Apache Qpid, Apache Solr, Outercurve, Eclipse, Node.js, Cocos2D, Ogre3D, Web Platform Docs, Symfony, Doctrine, WebKit, GitHub, CodePlex and more. This year, as the openness revolution continues to transform a world of devices connected to online services, MS Open Tech shipped 51 important open source devices and services projects. They have 25 active open source projects across CodePlex and GitHub, and they are active contributors to dozens other open source and open standards initiatives. Their team works closely with several Microsoft business groups on numerous standards initiatives, including the W3C’s HTML5, IETF’s HTTP/2.0, and work together with many open source foundations such as Outercurve Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation. They also help provide open source building blocks for interoperable cloud services, and have played a critical role in enabling developer choice of programming languages on Windows Azure, including Node.js, PHP, Python and Java in addition to .NET. They also partnered with open source companies to make NoSQL open source databases available as services on Windows Azure including MongoDB, Redis and CouchDB. They’re also helping developers deliver seamless “just works” experiences to consumers, extending their applications to reach more people in more ways. They work with open source communities such as Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) and jQuery to help those technologies support Windows devices, allowing developers to leverage their existing skills, code and tools. They are also creating a pool of open source engineering talent through the MS Open Tech Hub, an engineering program and a collaborative place to build open source projects, exchange and evolve open source engineering best practices, and marshal and temporarily assign resources from Microsoft to MS Open Tech (in addition to MS Open Tech full time employees) based on the needs of specific projects. Openness is at the heart of the growing world of connected devices – making the technology world increasingly complex and intertwined. At MS Open Tech, they’re focused on delivering customers any information, on any device, on multiple platforms.