Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

Satya Narayana Nadella (born 19 August 1967) is an Indian American business executive. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014. Before becoming CEO, he was the executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, responsible for building and running the company’s computing platforms.

Nadella was born in Hyderabad, India into a Telugu Hindu family. His mother Prabhavati was a Sanskrit lecturer and his father, Bukkapuram Nadella Yugandhar, was an Indian Administrative Service officer of the 1962 batch.

Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet before receiving a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology (then part of Mangalore University) in Karnataka in 1988. Nadella subsequently traveled to the U.S. to study for an M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, receiving his degree in 1990. Later, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1996.

Nadella said he “always wanted to build things” and that electrical engineering “was a great way for [him] to go discover what turned out to become a passion”, computer science.

Career

Nadella worked at Sun Microsystems as a member of its technology staff prior to joining Microsoft in 1992.

At Microsoft, Nadella has led major projects that included the company’s move to cloud computing and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world.

Nadella worked as the senior vice-president of Research and Development (R&D) for the Online Services Division and vice-president of the Microsoft Business Division. Later, he was made the president of Microsoft’s $19 billion Server and Tools Business and led a transformation of the company’s business and technology culture from client services to cloud infrastructure and services.

Previous positions held by Nadella include:

• President of the Server & Tools Division (9 February 2011 – February 2014)

• Senior Vice-President of Research and Development for the Online Services Division (March 2007 – February 2011)

• Vice-President of the Business Division

• Corporate Vice-President of Business Solutions and Search & Advertising Platform Group.

• Executive Vice-President of Cloud and Enterprise group,

On 4 February 2014, Nadella was announced as the new CEO of Microsoft, the third chief executive in the company’s history, following Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

In the years since becoming CEO, Nadella is viewed as having done well, with Microsoft stock having tripled by September 2018, with a 27% annual growth rate. In December 2018, comparably called him the best CEO of a large company in the United States, citing anonymous Nadella employee reviews.

In 2019, Nadella was named Financial Times (FT) Person of the Year, “Microsoft was at risk of technological irrelevance but the chief executive has presided over an era of stunning wealth creation”. He was awarded the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman (Overseas Indian Honour/Award) for business management by the Government of India in 2015.

Personal_Life

In 1992, Nadella married Anupama, the daughter of his father’s IAS batchmate. She was his junior at Manipal pursuing a B.Arch in the Faculty of Architecture. The couple have three children, a son and two daughters, and live in Clyde Hill and Bellevue, Washington.

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