SAO PAULO, Brazil--Microsoft on Monday shifted the leadership of its emerging market unit, placing former unified communications chief Anoop Gupta at the helm.
Orlando Ayala, the Microsoft executive who had been leading the unit (and with whom I had been traveling with in Colombia) is shifting to a new role inside Kevin Turner's sales unit, while Microsoft veteran Will Poole is retiring from Microsoft this fall. Poole, who had been heading the unit with Ayala, is a former top Windows executive, while Ayala had been sales chief and head of the midmarket group at Microsoft, prior to joining the company's Unlimited Potential effort.
Anoop Gupta
(Credit: Microsoft)Gupta will report to Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer.
"The mission of (the Unlimited Potential unit) is one that fits naturally with Craig's charter to develop the long-cycle research, innovation, and business incubations that will impact the future of technology--and the role it can play in addressing societal needs in areas like health care, education, and scientific discovery," Microsoft said in a statement.
Gupta plans to hire two new corporate vice presidents to oversee Microsoft's educational and emerging market products, Microsoft said.
Poole will report to Mundie until he leaves in the fall, while Microsoft called Ayala's job an expanded role but offered only vague indications of what he is doing, saying he will be involved in "external evangelism, field engagement, and direct input on strategy."
At its Government Leaders Forum in Berlin on Wednesday, Microsoft plans to announce that it is reinvesting in its Partners In Learning program, a global effort to provide software and training to teachers, students, and schools. The company is committing to another five years of the program.
In its first five years, Microsoft said the program reached 90 million people in 100 countries. The company plans to spend $235.5 million over the next five years, bringing its total investment to $500 million, but reach twice as many people in the next five years as it did during the first five.
Among other efforts, Partners in Learning provides training and certification for teachers, as well as an online gathering place where teachers can collaborate and share new curriculum ideas.
"We believe it is really the cornerstone of economic opportunity," said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft's emerging segments unit, dubbed Unlimited Potential. "Our software has been an important enabler of economic wealth."
Ayala highlighted several programs as recent highlights, including a Swedish teacher who partnered with a school in Madagascar to do a joint education project on biodiversity in Africa, and a robotics project in Malaysia where students created a mock disaster and used robotics to examine public safety issues.
In Colombia, Microsoft has a program in seven schools where students essentially do independent study on a laptop, using a curriculum that can move at exactly the student's own pace. The program was quite controversial when it began five years ago, Ayala said. "Today those students are scoring better in the national tests than traditional (students)."
In the U.S., Microsoft is sponsoring the Philadelphia School of the Future, where students use tablet PCs instead of textbooks.
Partnering with local governments and nonprofits is an important component of the program, Ayala said. "We know that no single model is going to fit everybody."
It also makes good economic sense, he said, noting that a greater level of partnership is what Microsoft believes will allow it to reach twice as many people in the next five years while actually spending slightly less than it had in the previous five.
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