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May - 2015 - issue > Cover Story

Satya Nadella: The Road Ahead

SI Team
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
SI Team
It's a Friday night, and a 25 year old bespectacled man is waiting at an airport terminal, his flight to Chicago due in twenty minutes. The same routine would be repeated the week next and for two years after that. Studying business at the University of Chicago on Saturdays and returning to Redmond to work for Microsoft [NASDAQ:MSFT] during the week, this young man had his goals set far. He was determined not to let go of his dream job because he believed that Microsoft was the best place to empower people to do magical things. 22 years later, it is the same relentless aspiration that saw him being positioned as the CEO of Microsoft and the man is no other than Satya Nadella.

Nadella's reasons for sticking to the software giant Microsoft for over 22 years was simple. "Many companies aspire to change the world. But very few have all the elements required: talent, resources and perseverance. Microsoft has proven that it has all three in abundance," expressed Nadella. Recounting an incident from the early days when he joined Microsoft, the CIO of large American multinational banking firm refused to meet Nadella, as back then Microsoft was mainly perceived as a company that sold software for the home PC. Today, with the dramatic rise of enterprise computing, Microsoft embeds Office Software in practically every business in the world. With changing times technology is constantly evolving and Nadella is the best judge to that. "Our industry does not respect tradition-it only respects innovation," remarked the CEO.

Microsoft the Nadella Way
The first thing, Nadella implemented once he came into power was the "Mobile First Cloud Strategy" detracting from the "devices and services company," Microsoft previously emphasized on. To kick start this complete Cloud delivery, Microsoft announced several enhancements to its enterprise-grade, hybrid cloud platform, including the new Azure G-series of virtual machines and Premium Storage and a new Azure Marketplace. Microsoft delivered more than 500 new Azure services and features since last year and took a number of significant steps to use open source even more broadly. Microsoft and IBM have also fostered an alliance, accounting to which they will provide elements of their respective enterprise software on each other's clouds. In the recent Microsoft Build Developer Conference, Nadella vouched that the company is aiming for $20 billion in revenue from cloud services by the end of the fiscal year in June 2018.

However, the crux of Microsoft's future popularity is pinned on Project Hololens, discerned as the Holy Grail in the Nadella era. When Microsoft was founded, its ambitious goal to power every house with a personal computer seemed as radical as Project Hololens in current time. Tucked away in the basement of Building 92, there is an incognito project underway which many of Microsoft employees are completely unaware of. Hololens is similar to a face computer that resembles a pair of space-age sunglasses, which merges the virtual with the real. The stakes on this project are extremely high and it stands as Nadella's testament to reestablish the innovation and creativity that Microsoft is known for.

Undertaking his rebranding challenge with immense gusto, Nadella has been networking at a vehement pace since he filled in the coveted position of CEO. He has spent time meeting with startup founders, focused on new partnership with technology stalwarts like Dropbox and SalesForce and has promising products in line for the future. Also, it cannot be ignored than since Nadella stepped into the role, Microsoft's revenue has jumped 12 percent to $93.5 billion. There is definitely a sense when experts say that Nadella's Microsoft is on some sort of groove.

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