Washington-based company Microsoft Corp. will open a software maintenance, logistics, and technical assistance centre in Sofia, Bulgaria in the next 12 months. The firm had originally planned to open the centre in Serbia. It will service most of the Balkan countries including Slovenia, Macedonia, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Greece.

At an official ceremony on 3 July, Microsofts senior vice president Eric Rudder and the Bulgarian ITC Agency signed a memorandum for cooperation mapping out a long-term partnership between Bulgaria and the software giant.

Rudder also met with President Georgi Parvanov in Sofia, where the two discussed ways to boost cooperation in the fields of e-government and online education and training. Parvanov has ambitious plans to make Bulgaria a regional centre for the ICT sector. The President was particularly pleased with the fact that Microsoft is setting up a centre for free customer support that would serve the whole of south eastern Europe and Greece. The new centre will work in conjunction with a smaller Microsoft centre in Romania.

Microsoft chose Bulgaria and Romania for the construction of the maintenance centres because of the highly qualifies IT experts in the two countries, the stable economy and the development opportunities.

Meanwhile, Googles vice president, Vinton Cerf, has been in Sofia this week discussing prospective joint projects for fast-speed development of the IT society in Bulgaria. Google is considering opening offices in Bulgaria, the company’s vice president Vinton Cerf said during a meeting with Bulgarian parliament and IT companies. Cerf announced in the meeting that in order for Bulgaria to attract more companies like Google, it had to develop its internet services, education, employee qualification programmes and small business market.
At the moment, a relatively small number of Bulgarians conclude their financial transactions using the internet. One of the reasons was the lack of mechanisms guaranteeing the security of information, experts said.