Last month, the Shenzhen-based company announced plans to open a smartphone-software developmentcenter in Helsinki and double the size of its research operations in Europe.
When Bill Gates was looking for a location for Microsoft's second softwaredevelopmentcenter outside the U.S. (the first was in Israel), he chose Hyderabad, capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings can also provide quick, low-cost access to data center resources for softwaredevelopment and prototyping.