Microsoft announced a new initiative designed to narrow the gap between its research laboratories and end users, and at the same time breathe new life into its search and advertising technologies. Particularly for such tasks, the Redmond company announced the creation of the Internet Services Research Center (ISRC) applied research group. In Microsoft's vision, ISRC will focus entirely on speeding up the process between building search and advertising innovations and their implementation in the company's infrastructure directly available to end users. ISRC will be an integer part of Microsoft Research, but it will collaborate with various groups across the company in order to accelerate the delivery of innovations in search and ad technologies.

"We're building an even tighter bridge between researchers and product teams," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. "The ISRC represents a new model for moving technologies quickly from research projects to improved products and services."

"We're committed to delivering better, faster search results for our customers and more creative, effective ways of delivering value for advertisers," explained Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Search & Advertising Platform Group. "We have been able to make an incredible amount of progress in just a few years. Our investments in engineering in conjunction with ISRC, Live Labs and Microsoft Research will enable us to bring new innovations to the market in a rapid fashion."

The former head of the Microsoft Research's Asia lab, Harry Shum will lead the ISRC from the position of corporate vice president. Shum's goal will be to closely synchronize Microsoft's development and research efforts in order to evolve the standard for advertising and search. "Throughout the company we have crack research teams with brilliant minds and fires in their bellies working on next-generation search and ad technologies," said Shum. "We're harnessing their energy and ingenuity and consolidating them into one, cohesive organization."