KTR thanks friends in the Silicon Valley

Hyderabad: IT minister K.T. Rama Rao was also all praise for Silicon Valley’s support Hyderabad has been receiving recently. “I don’t know if it’s plain luck but there are these big names now all over the Valley, who are from here. We need more such Hyderabadis to make it big.”

Mr Rama Rao was at the Deccan Chronicle office shortly after meeting Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Infosys boss Vishal Sikka and Aruba Networks’ co-founder Keerti Melkote at the city’s start-up incubator T-hub.

The IT minister also described how a surprise for Mr Nadella went rather off key, thanks to a very excited Shantanu Narayan, the CEO of Adobe. “When Shantanu had visited T-hub last time we made him sign on the quote board at T-Hub and we thought of repeating that tradition for Satya. But Shantanu had already emailed a photo of the board to Satya, spoiling the surprise,” the minister said. According to Mr Rama Rao, Mr Nadella has expressed an interest to collaborate with the government on activation of cloud services in four areas, — SMEs, health, education and startups.

For SMEs, Microsoft will build a platform for them to showcase products — thereby increasing market reach. In the health sector, the company plans to enable cloud services which will enable doctors and patients remote access health reports and diagnosis.

According to Mr Rama Rao, Microsoft has also offered to do a pilot project in Telangana under Microsoft’s Shiksha initiative and Mr Nadella is believed to have extended Microsoft Ventures’ help in mentoring emerging startups under this initiative.

“Our country is not respected for entrepreneurial abilities as that sense of creativity in children is still being stifled by parents. Having an idea is not important, being able to act on the idea and taking it to a logical conclusion is important and this can happen only when freedom is given” Mr Rama Rao narrated the example of one Mallesham, a weaver from Nalgonda who had developed an automated machine for weavers.

The Class III dropout ended up receiving an award the President himself. “So, if someone like Malleshan can come up with something so innovative, we need to encourage more such ideas and give people behind those ideas time and space to grow. Which is very motto of the T-Hub — ‘Walk in with an idea, walk out with a product’,” Mr Rama Rao said.