Updated: May 4, 2009

Gurdeep Singh Pall is the corporate vice president for the Office Communications Group at Microsoft Corp. and part of the Microsoft Business Division's senior leadership team. He is responsible for vision, product strategy and business development, and R&D for Microsoft's Unified Communications offerings, including Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Office Communicator, Microsoft Office Live Meeting service and Microsoft Office Communications Online.

Pall joined Microsoft in January 1990 as a software design engineer. He has worked on many breakthrough products in his tenure, starting with LAN Manager Remote Access Service. He was part of the Windows NT development team, working on the first version of Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 as a software design engineer, all the way through Windows XP in 2001 as general manager of Windows Networking. During his work on Windows, he led design and implementation of core networking technologies such as PPP, TCP/IP, UPnP, VPNs, routing and Wi-Fi, and parts of the operating system. He co-authored the first VPN protocol in the industry – Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) – which received the prestigious Innovation of the Year award from PC Magazine in 1996. He also authored several documents and standards in the networking area in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards body in the mid-1990s. Pall was appointed general manager of Windows Real-Time Communications efforts in January 2002 and helped develop a broad RTC strategy that led to the formation of the Real Time Collaboration division and acquisition of PlaceWare Inc. (now called Microsoft Office Live Meeting). Since then, Pall has led acquisitions of media-streams.com AG and Parlano and key industry partnerships. Microsoft's Unified Communications efforts have received many technical and design industry awards. Pall was named one of the 15 Innovators & Influencers Who Will Make A Difference in 2008 by Information Week. Pall recently co-authored "Institutional Memory Goes Digital," which was published by Harvard Business Review as part of "Breakthrough Ideas for 2009" and was presented at the World Economic Forum 2009 in Davos, Switzerland.

Pall has more than 20 patents (in process or approved) in networking, VoIP and collaboration areas. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Oregon and an undergraduate degree in computer engineering from Birla Institute of Technology in India.

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