Microsoft appoints Rajiv Kumar as Microsoft India managing director

Microsoft appointed Rajiv Kumar as managing director of Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd (MIRPL). Currently, corporate vice-president of Microsoft's Experiences and Devices (E+D) Group, Kumar 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. Kumar has a track record of strong people leadership, innovation and sharp business acumen in his 27-year long career at Microsoft. Over the years, he has innovated a variety of products and built large world class engineering organizations rooted in the foundation of a strong culture of Microsoft, according to a company statement.

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

He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Roorkee and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin. He joined Microsoft, Redmond in 1992 as a campushire 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. Kumar will work towards enhancing impetus in empowering communities through technology.

Set up in 1998, Microsoft India Development Center (IDC) in MIRPL is one of Microsoft's largest R&D centers outside the Redmond headquarters that is building products and services for driving digital innovation that helps transform individuals and organizations across all industry verticals, and building solutions for empowering emerging markets like India in areas like healthcare, agriculture and education.