Google has hired Yahoo India’s chief technology officer, Prasad Bhaarat Ram, and placed him in charge of research and development in Bangalore.
The high-profile recruitment comes less than two weeks after Google nabbed AOL’s top AIM developer. Google has also proven adept at poaching high-profile employees from Microsoft.
What’s interesting to me about this hire is that Yahoo — if its September 2006 corporate overview is taken at face value — is betting on increased performance in the Asia Pacific region to bolster the company’s finances. While Ram is only one employee in a very broad region, his hiring could be seen as a setback for Yahoo.
Ram was appointed CTO, Bangalore by Yahoo in 2004. He was previously the CTO at Dynamax Technology, where he developed dynamic Web services composition technology. Prior to that he was general manager of Xerox Rights Management, now ContentGuard, a joint venture focused on DRM technology and controlled by Microsoft, Thomson and Time Warner.
Ram graduated from the University of California in 1993. His dissertation was titled A New Understanding of Greed.