Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella, son of an IAS officer who was secretary to former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, is being tipped strongly to become chief executive of Microsoft, the storied software company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, according to a raft of business outlets citing sources familiar with deliberations on the matter.
Nadella, 46, is a 22-year Microsoft insider who now heads the company's cloud and enterprise group. If the Microsoft board, which has been searching for a successor to current CEO Steve Ballmer for nearly five months, goes through with his appointment, he will be the top-ranked CEO of Indian-origin, comfortably overtaking Indra Nooyi of Pepsico, which is the world's 44th ranked company in terms of market value. An announcement is expected as early as Friday.
Microsoft is currently the fourth largest company by market cap ($308 billion) after Apple ($450 billion), Exxon Mobil ($442 billion) and Google ($379 billion).
Nadella grew up in Hyderabad. His father, B N Yugandhar, went on to become a Planning Commission member, and friends recollect him as "a jholawala, a man with an NGO mindset."
Nadella studied at the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, the alma mater of other global business bigwigs like Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, and Prem Watsa, chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings. He did his engineering from Manipal University between 1984 and 1988, and then went to the US where he received a degree in computer science and an MBA.
He worked briefly with Sun Microsystems, before joining Microsoft in 1992. At Microsoft, he has worked in a variety of businesses, from core enterprise products to online services including Bing, MSN and the cloud platform Azure.
He is part of a large contingent of Indians, numbering in the thousands, who joined Microsoft in the 1990s, leading former honcho Bill Gates to look at India as both a research hub and a market after he recognized the country's potential on both counts. Microsoft's Hyderabad campus is now the company's largest non US-base. The company has nearly 5000 employees in India out of its 100,000-strong workforce.
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