Microsoft names Satya Nadella president of Server and Tools

Microsoft is promoting Satya Nadella, a senior vice president, to the president's spot for the Server and Tools business. He will be in charge of the company's biggest hope for growth, its cloud computing platform.

Nadella will fill Bob Muglia's spot. In January, the company unexpectedly said Muglia would be leaving after Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said it was time for a change. Muglia will work with Nadella on the transition until he leaves in the summer.

It's a cross-silo promotion for Microsoft since Nadella previously worked as senior vice president for research and development in the Online Services division, which runs Bing and MSN. Amithabh Srivastava, a senior vice president for Server and Tools, seemed the heir apparent. He is now leaving Microsoft, Ballmer said in his Wednesday e-mail to employees about the personnel changes.

Nadella, 43, has worked for Microsoft for 19 years. In the Online Services division, he worked on engineering and worked on the launch of Bing, MSN updates and integrating the Microsoft-Yahoo partnership to combine search and advertising on Microsoft's Bing search engine. The company has drawn from that division's experience running Bing, Hotmail and MSN.com to build its cloud computing platform Azure in the Server and Tools division. Nadella previously worked in Microsoft Business Solutions on Dynamics, the company's customer relationship management software.

"In deciding who should take the business forward, we wanted someone with the right mix of leadership, vision and hard-core engineering chops. We wanted someone who could define the future of business computing and further expand our ability to bring the cloud to business customers and developers in game-changing ways," Ballmer said in an e-mail to all employees.

Nadella said in his e-mail to the Server and Tools division that Microsoft is on a path to change the world again with its cloud platform. "Today we are seeing our existing customers move to the cloud to address issues of cost and complexity; tomorrow, our work as leaders in innovation will result in new scenarios and workloads (some of them unimagined!) enabled in the cloud."

He also goes on at length about being principle driven, which is noteworthy given Muglia's exit e-mail to his group, in which he talked extensively about integrity.

This is what Nadella said in Wednesday's e-mail: "I want us to be principle driven. What I value most is coming together around a singular mission and working this mission with great teamwork, guided by our principles, authentic communication and impeccable coordination. Individual agendas cannot bog us down ? we will make decisions and move on as a team."

This is what Muglia wrote in his Jan. 10 e-mail: "The foundation of who I am is based on living with integrity. Integrity requires principles, and my primary principle is to focus on doing the right thing, as best I can. The best thing, to the best of my ability, for our customers, our products, our shareholders, and of course, our people."

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