Rajiv Kumar appointed as MD of Microsoft India R&D

Microsoft on Monday said it has appointed Rajiv Kumar as the new managing director of Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd (MIRPL).

Rajiv, who is currently the Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft's Experiences and Devices (E+D) Group, will replace Anil Bhansali, who held this role for six years. Anil will continue as the Corporate Vice President of Cloud & Enterprise and will be relocating to Redmond, USA, Microsoft said.

"Rajiv has a track record of strong people leadership, innovation and sharp business acumen, all along in his 27-year long career at Microsoft. 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," the company said in a press release

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

Rajiv 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 is expected to further build upon the capability of the engineering division and reinforce the culture of inclusion, innovation and collaboration, the company said.

Microsoft India Development Center (IDC) in MIRPL is one of Microsoft's largest R&D centers outside the company's Redmond headquarters. Set up in 1998, IDC represents Microsoft's strategy of globally shared development to build products and services for driving digital innovation that helps transform individuals and organizations across all industry verticals.

Edited by Chitranjan Kumar

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