American technology giant Microsoft‘s chief operating officer (CEO) Satya Nadella has been named the company’s chairman, an additional role in which he will “lead the work to set the agenda for the board” on Wednesday.  Nadella succeeded John W Thompson who will now serve as the lead independent director. 

Nadella, 53, joined Microsoft in 1992 as a junior engineer. During that time, he led several significant projects that included the company’s gigantic call to cloud computing and the development of one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world.

After 8 years, Nadella was given his first executive position as the vice president of Microsoft Central. One year later in 2001, he was promoted to senior VP of Microsoft Business Solutions. and by 2007 Nadella was made the president of Microsoft’s $19 billion Server and Tools Business that not only gave him control over Bing but the early versions of Microsoft Office and Xbox Live as well.

In 2011, the Indian engineer was made president of the Server and Tools Division of Microsoft which looked after the Azure cloud platform and products for companies’ data centers like Windows Server and the SQL Server database. In Nadella’s tenure, the division’s revenue went up from $16.6 billion worth to $20.3 billion within two years.

In February 2014, Satya Nadella became the CEO of the global tech brand succeeding Steve Ballmer. The decision was taken by company’s founder Bill Gates himself.

Now, Nadela has assumed control as the chairman of Microsoft. He also won global recognition as ‘Person of the Year’ by Financial Times and ‘Businessperson of the Year’ by Fortune magazine.