Following a visit from Microsoft's Senior Vice President Eric Rudder in Bulgaria on Sunday, the Redmond's Company Balkan expansion strategy has shifted its focus from Serbia to the country south of the Danube for the opening of a software logistics center. The Sofia based future center is planned to be fully operational within a year and to start providing free customer support for the whole South Eastern Europe. It is expected to concentrate all customer services in the region, and even draw all head-to-tail customer support from its Bucharest's counterpart, leaving its Romanian analogue to deal only with the management of certain programs and licenses. In this context, the center in Bucharest deals mainly with paid technical support, and the Center for Free Customer Support in Bulgaria will take on no less than 10 European countries, becoming the largest one in the Balkans.

Rudder also signed a Cooperation Memorandum with the Bulgarian State Agency for Information Technology and Communications (SAITC) that covers the areas of strategic development, governmental programs and initiatives to help evolve the local ITC sector.

Microsoft's strategy also plans to offer the local market all of its future products in the native language following a meeting between Rudder and the Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov, discussing the investment opportunities Bulgaria presents to Microsoft, as the two parts will further continue their collaboration in the fields of e-government and online education and training.