Microsoft’s New CEO: Satya Nadella

Microsoft has moved from being a follower in the cloud space five years ago to being a leader in the space and credit should be given to Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO.  Satya drove the Cloud Team at Microsoft and now drives the entire company further down the vision of a cloud computing Microsoft. 

I attended Satya’s presentation at the Microsoft partner conference yesterday and although he does not have the presence of Steve Ballmer, he does have a plan and it is working.   The news today that Microsoft will be reducing staff by 18,000 because of duplicate roles since the acquisition of Nokia is a distraction and not the story of what is going on at Microsoft.   Nokia acquisition may prove to be a bad decision or possibly brilliant but it doesn’t really matter that much for the overall success of Microsoft as a cloud provider. 

Microsoft is gaining ground with the Surface 3 and this one device may become the number one computing device.   Office 365 is leading the way for email and desktop apps leaving Google Apps in the dust.  Microsoft Azure cloud server platform is coming on strong and is the leading competitor to Amazon AWS. 

Microsoft is able to deliver cloud applications and servers at a lower cost than the traditional model.  Microsoft realizes this and Satya is leading an aggressive campaign to move customers to the Microsoft Cloud with the help of their partners like Nortec.  Satya Nadella will continue to use this strategy building Microsoft into a larger stronger company.