Bangalore :
Indian American Satya Nadella features prominently on several shortlists of internal candidates to succeed Steve Ballmer as CEO of Microsoft. Ballmer on Friday announced that he will part his ways with the world’s largest software company in the next 12 months.
Nadella, 44, joined the company in 1992 after a brief stint with Sun Microsystems. He has served in multiple roles, and is currently head of the cloud and enterprise group, responsible for building and running the company’s computing platforms, developer tools and cloud services. Nadella’s team delivers the Cloud OS, Microsoft’s next generation backend platform.
Nadella grew up in Hyderabad, studied in Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, the alma mater of business notables like Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, and Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings, which was recently in the news as a likely bidder for Blackberry.
Nadella went on to do a Bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Mangalore University, between 1984 and 1988, and then went to the US, where he did a Masters in computer science and an MBA.
In Microsoft, he started in the server group, and moved on to the business solutions group — developing and managing the ERP and CRM products — and then became senior VP of R&D for the online services division that includes Bing, MSN and the advertising platform.
In 2011, Nadella was back where he started, in the server and tools business, as its president.
In July this year, he was handed the responsibility of the Cloud OS platform, which, as Microsoft’s website says, “Not only powers all of Microsoft’s internet scale cloud services (including Office 365, Bing, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, Skype and Dynamics) but also fuels global enterprises around the world to meet their most challenging and mission-critical computing needs.”
The website goes on to say, “Today, businesses everywhere depend on the products that make up the Cloud OS, including Windows Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio and System Center.”
Nadella’s diverse experience within Microsoft is seen as giving him a strong chance to succeed Ballmer. His experience with cloud makes his claim stronger, given that cloud is now seen as the future of computing.
Though Microsoft was a late entrant into cloud, it has made rapid progress in the space. In an interview to TOI in late 2011, when asked about Google and Amazon having a long headstart in cloud, Nadella said, “They don’t have the footprint in the enterprise today in terms of the applications required. There is Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com on the public cloud side, and Oracle, VMware on the private cloud side. We are the only one that straddles both sides effectively. Every customer looks for someone who solves the public and private sides with commonality — common identity, common virtualization, common management.”
He said Google’s strength is in search. “But search is one application, not truly representative of enterprise. With Office 365, we are heads and shoulders above any Google Apps adoption. They are competing with us, but if you look at the customers that we are gaining, it’s significant,” he had said.
source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Tech> Tech News> Movements> Steve Ballmer / by Sujit John, TNN / August 25th, 2013