Indian Nadella to head Microsoft

Microsoft's cloud chief, Satya Nadella, will lead the company as its next chief executive. Microsoft's board is "preparing to name" Nadella chief executive, Bloomberg reported . Nadella, whose official title is executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group, had been one of the front-runners in the race to replace current chief executive Steve Ballmer, who said last August that he planned to step down within a year.

But the board is also considering replacing Bill Gates as chairman of the company. The problem with replacing Ballmer or Gates, is that no one executive at Microsoft has traversed the range of the company's products, which include consumer businesses like the Xbox, cloud services such as Azure, the company's Windows business, server and development services like Visual Studio, and an emerging mobile business, too.

Nadella, 44, is an Indian-born engineer with degrees in electronics, computer science (from the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee), and business administration (from the University of Chicago). Nadella has worked since 1992 at Microsoft, and is credited with launching BizTalk, Microsoft's Commerce Server, and Microsoft's Office Small Business products.

However, Nadella is most famous for having overseen Microsoft's online initiatives, where he transformed Windows Live Search into Bing. The market share for Microsoft's search offering stands at 18.2 percent, according to Microsoft's recent earnings.