Microsoft Promotes Azure, Connected Systems Leaders

Microsoft has made a series of recent moves in various divisions, including promotions in the company’s Windows Azure group, Connected Systems Division and Server and Tools business unit.

Amitabh Srivastava, Microsoft corporate vice president of Windows Azure, was promoted to senior vice president on March 2. Srivastava is known as the right hand man to Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie on the software giant’s Windows Azure cloud computing effort. Srivastava will continue to lead Microsoft’s efforts to build Windows Azure.

Microsoft officials said Srivastava has shown a strong entrepreneurial spark since joining the company 12 years ago as a senior researcher in Microsoft Research. His passion for improving the reliability and performance of Microsoft software led to creation of the Programmer Productivity Research Center in March 1999, the company said. And in recognition of his achievements, Amitabh was named a Distinguished Engineer in 2001. Amitabh became a corporate vice president in the Windows group in 2003, where he led the effort to redefine the Windows Vista engineering process. In this role, he was responsible for the development of core operating system components.

Meanwhile, Microsoft corporate vice president Robert Wahbe, who had been leading the company’s Connected Systems Division, will now lead Microsoft’s Server and Tools marketing. Wahbe will be filling the role left vacant last year by Senior Vice President Andy Lees, who is now vice president of Microsoft’s Mobile Communication Business.

In his new role, Wahbe will be responsible for continued efforts to streamline and simplify product offerings and drive greater alignment with sales and services. Wahbe has been with the company for more than 13 years and has served in a number of product development roles, from co-founding the team chartered to deliver Web services and the Windows Communication Foundation, which now provides the foundation for Web services for both Windows Server and Microsoft’s forthcoming cloud platform, to more recent efforts leading Microsoft’s “Oslo” effort to simplify building applications by using modeling and domain specific languages.

Microsoft also announced that the company’s Connected Systems Division will now be combined with the Data and Storage Platforms Division under the leadership of corporate vice president, Ted Kummert. This new group will be called the Business Platform Division (BPD) and reside within the Server and Tools Business group. BPD will enable greater synergies between these product groups and help Microsoft pursue its goals from the application tier to the storage tier in a more integrated way. This combined organization will continue to invest in the tools and services developers and IT professionals need to model, develop, deploy, scale and manage business applications more productively in an increasingly connected yet distributed environment.