Rajiv Kumar takes charge as Microsoft India R&D's Managing Director, R&D

Microsoft has appointed Rajiv Kumar as the new Managing Director of Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd (MIRPL). Currently Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices (E+D) Group, Rajiv is taking on this added responsibility from Anil Bhansali, who held this role for the last six years. Bhansali will continue as the Corporate Vice President of Cloud & Enterprise and will be relocating to Redmond, USA.

Microsoft India Development Center (IDC) in MIRPL is one of Microsoft’s largest R&D centers outside the Redmond headquarters.

Kumar, according to the press statement, has a track record of strong people leadership, innovation and sharp business acumen, founded in engineering excellence all along in his 27-year long career at Microsoft. He is known as a leader that creates clarity of vision, generates energy in the team and delivers success. Over the years he has innovated on a variety of products and built large world-class engineering organizations rooted in the foundation of a strong culture of Microsoft.

Among Kumar’s recent key contributions to Microsoft are Kaizala (an enterprise productivity chat app) & bootstrapping the campus hiring program in India resulting in Microsoft hiring the best talent from premier engineering colleges in India.

Kumar holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee and a master’s in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin. He joined Microsoft, Redmond in 1992 as a campus-hire and moved up from being a developer in the Visual Basic team to Development Manager in BizTalk and then the Product Unit Manager for the Content Management Server team, which became a part of the SharePoint server.

As the Managing Director, Rajiv Kumar is expected to further build upon the capability of the engineering division and reinforce the culture of inclusion, innovation, and collaboration. A special area of focus, which Kumar is very passionate about, is to have greater impetus in empowering communities through technology. Kumar has expressed that he aspires to build the development center to an organization that continues to celebrate the diversity of people, business and technology.