If there is one Indian American said to have the ear of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, it is Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president, technology policy and strategy.

A Delhi-born IIT alumnus, Gupta was appointed to his current position in February after serving four years as corporate vice president of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, leading the company's client-server-service efforts to provide business communications solutions and platform components.

Before leading that group, Gupta was technology assistant to Gates and helped define the company's strategy for real-time collaboration. Arguably the most powerful Indian American in Microsoft he has acted as a sounding board for Gates on trends and ideas in technology.

Gates once mentioned Gupta in an interview in which he talked about

		in his words 'We can now offer a single platform for multiple communications needs, which means one license to manage, one set of tools to learn, and the opportunity to create multiple, more productive ways for employees or customers to communicate.'
	Photo: Microsoft

Indian Americans at the company. In his role as Gates' technology assistant, Gupta's job was to sit with him through product, technology, architecture reviews across the whole company, then add his ideas.

Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Gupta was a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford for 11 years. His research 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 and has contributed to more than 40 patents.

Before joining Stanford in 1987, he was on the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon, where he received his PhD 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.