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[he is 46 now] , 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 [U Wisconsin] and MBA [U Chicago] 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.
This was the first big success for him, back in the early 2000s. Little wonder Nadella climbed the greasy corporate pole with ease—from vice president, corporate VP, president, executive vice president—all in a space of last 10 years. Moorthy Uppaluri, CEO of Randstad India, who until about seven months ago worked at Microsoft, said, “Nadella is always ready to take on challenges and he’s a great leader. The part of the business that he’s accountable for is very profitable. He’s a hands on guy, without hang ups, he’s a very simple, down-to-earth person, he listens to people’s issues and confronts them, straight shooter, so those are some of the qualities that really make him successful." Adds Venkatesan, who recently called on Nadella for the launch of his book (Conquering Chaos, Win in India, Win Everywhere) in Seattle, “Nadella couldn’t make it but he went out of the way to apologise for his absence."
However to run Microsoft at this juncture, where the $78-billion computer giant is seen as a leader in decline, with markets shifting from enterprise technologies (which Microsoft dominated) to consumer technologies (where it competes with Google, Apple, Amazon and others) will be a big task for Nadella. Says Ventakesan, “Nadella is an enterprise guy and not a consumer guy. For Microsoft, you need a person with a very strong business vision— who will protect the bread and butter enterprise business for the company and take on competitors in the new mobile-driven areas."
“The negative is lack of consumer experience," adds another analyst who wished not to be named. “Nadella will bring a refreshing cultural transformation which is key to Microsoft’s success in future. But he will need a strong consumer-focused lieutenant." According to James, Nadella is strong willed and committed. “He can roughshod over some folks at times," he says. “He does not have the patience for dissent from the path forward, but does have the time to listen to tweak the strategy. And when he sees a good plan, he empowers those who bring it to him."
Perhaps his understanding of emerging markets will be a big positive.