Sundar Pichai Joins Big League Of Indian-Origin CEOs At The Helm Of Fortune 500 Cos

WASHINGTON: Chennai born, IIT Kharagpur-educated Sundar Pichai has become the head of a "slightly slimmed down Google", with the search giant in a major corporate restructuring forming an umbrella company called Alphabet.

Taking over the operational management of Google's search, YouTube and financial-services units, Pichai, 43, becomes only the third chief executive of the company after Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founder Larry Page.

With the change, the company's founders Sergey Brin and Page will run Alphabet -- Page as CEO and Brin as president.

Many other companies will operate under Alphabet acting as the parent holding company, including Google, a company focused on health efforts called Life Sciences, and a company focused on longevity called Calico.

"This new structure will allow us to keep tremendous focus on the extraordinary opportunities we have inside of Google," said Google chief executive Page in a blog post titled "G is for Google" on Monday.

"A key part of this is Sundar Pichai," he said.

"Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I've been tremendously enjoying our work together."

"He has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our internet businesses," Page wrote.

Pichai, who came to the US in 1993 after getting a BTech from IIT-Kharagpur, earned an MS from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton School of Business.

He has worked at Google -- which was founded in 1998 -- since it went public in 2004, most recently as the senior vice president of product.

He is the second person of Indian origin to head a major IT company after Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella who became CEO of software giant Microsoft in February 2014, succeeding Steve Ballmer.

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