Satya Nadella: 'Mr Nice guy' could finish first as Microsoft's next CEO

NEW DELHI: All rounder, shy, humble, super nice, collaborative, very technical, deeply engaged, a visionary leader and strong willed. Well, if these are the qualities that the Microsoft board is looking for in its third chief, after founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella is the right man for the job.

That's how colleagues, friends and a cross section of industry leaders and technology industry watchers describe 45-year-old Nadella. Calling Nadella "among the brightest brains at Microsoft", Ravi Venkatesan, former chairman of Microsoft India, said "Nadella's strength lies in building relationships."

"The positive for Nadella is his successful track record," said Patrick Moorhead, founder, Moore Insights & Strategy, a US-based technology analyst, in a recent interaction with ET. In his 22 years at Microsoft, Nadella started at the server group, followed by the software division, online services, R&D, advertising platform, back to server division as its head and now oversees cloud services (Azure). "A key strength has been his success in shifting the culture of the server and tools business to an agile cloud-first model.

Nadella fought the hard battles within Microsoft and brought in collaboration within teams," says Staten James, vice president & principal analyst Forrester research. On what makes Nadella a frontrunner for the CEO job, James adds, "Microsoft's culture is unique and would take an outsider quite a while to understand and affect change upon. Nadella has already shown that he can drive the kind of change needed for Microsoft."

Born in 1969, Nadella went to Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, also the alma mater of Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe Systems, and Prem Watsa, founder-CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings and many more. However, in school and college in India Nadella was quite the boy next door. "People tell me he did well in academics, but was never in the limelight," recalls Dr D Srikanth Rao, joint-director at the Manipal Institute of Technology.

Rao joined MIT as a faculty in 1989, a year after Nadella graduated. Nadella finished his BTech in electrical engineering from Mangalore University in 1988 and went on to do an MS in computer science and MBA in the US. After a brief stint at Sun Microsystems, he joined Microsoft in 1992, and has stayed on. Nadella proved his mettle at Microsoft when he made an attractive business out of the ugly duckling within Microsoft --Microsoft Business Services. Nadella scaled it up from about $1.5 billion to $5 billion in about five years.

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