Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes time out to pose with Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu's grandson in Hyderabad on Monday.
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana once again competed for the time and attention of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had left Hyderabad and the country when the two states were still one.
A breakfast meeting on Monday between the software giant's CEO and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu led to the signing of documents to partner in education, e-citizen services and agriculture. Mr Naidu reportedly invited Microsoft to open an office in Andhra Pradesh. Microsoft has a huge campus in Hyderabad, the joint capital of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The MoU says Microsoft will support Andhra Pradesh in building three proof-of-concept solutions, using Azure Machine Learning and Advanced Visualization lab technology for predictive analysis.
Mr Nadella also met Mr Naidu's family and posed for photographs with his grandson Devansh, son Lokesh and wife Bhuvaneswari.
After the breakfast meeting, Mr Nadella headed straight to startup incubator, T-Hub, which is being showcased by the Telangana government as the biggest of its kind in the country. He was accompanied by Vishal Sikka of Infosys and Keerthi Melkote of Anura from the Hewlett Packard group.
"We discussed public cloud enablement of lot of services which help small and medium industries, big scale industries in Telangana. Secondly, we talked about digitalising all of our classrooms across various government schools in Telangana," the state's IT Minister, KT Rama Rao, said.
At the Hub, Mr Nadella had a closed door interaction session with budding entrepreneurs, who described it as "scintillating''. Mr Nadella is reported to have expressed interest in working with T-Hub to develop accelerators and startups.
"My energy comes from the interaction with entrepreneurs across the world,'' he reportedly said. Mr Nadella told entrepreneurs, "three points to success are concept, capability (and) culture.''
Mr Nadella grew up in Hyderabad, which is geographically part of Telangana now and his family comes from Anantpur in Andhra Pradesh.
Last September, the Indian-origin chief of Microsoft had addressed employees at the India Development Centre, in existence since 1998, and the largest Microsoft office outside its headquarters at Redmond, USA.