Microsoft has announced a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., to advance the company's investment in openness - including interoperability, open standards and open source. Led by Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, Microsoft's team has worked with many business groups on numerous standards initiatives across Microsoft, including the W3C's HTML5, IETF's HTTP 2.0, cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS, and in many open source environments such as Node.js, MongoDB and Phonegap/Cordova.

"We help provide open source building blocks for interoperable cloud services and collaborate on cloud standards in DMTF and OASIS; support developer choice of programming languages to enable Node.js, PHP and Java in addition to .NET in Windows Azure; and work with the PhoneGap/Cordova and jQuery Mobile and other open source communities to support Windows Phone," said Jean Paoli. Paoli is one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Microsoft plans to continue to engage with the open source and standards communities in a variety of ways, including working with many open source foundations such as Outercurve Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and many standards organizations.

Many open standards are already supported by Microsoft and many open source environments including Linux, Hadoop, MongoDB, Drupal, Joomla and others, run on Microsoft's platform.

"This structure will make it easier and faster to iterate and release open source software, participate in existing open source efforts, and accept contributions from the community. Over time the community will see greater interaction with the open standards and open source worlds," Paoli added.