Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India has moved on. A company release says: “Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman and Corporate Vice President, Microsoft India, has decided to pursue opportunities outside of Microsoft. A successor will be named in the near future, and Venkatesan will partner with Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International, to ensure a smooth transition with his successor. Meanwhile, Sanket Akerkar will continue to lead overall sales, marketing and services businesses as the Sales & Marketing head for India, and Hemant Sachdev will continue to lead the Consumer and Online business”.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Venkatesan worked for over seventeen years with Cummins Inc, a US-based designer, manufacturer and distributor of engines and related technologies. He served in various leadership capacities at Cummins including Chairman of Cummins India Limited and Managing Director of Tata Cummins Limited, a joint venture between Cummins Inc. and Tata Motors. His biggest contribution at Cummins was leading the transformation of Cummins in India into the leading provider of power solutions and the largest manufacturer of automotive engines in the country.
Venkatesan has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1985), an MS in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University (1986) and a MBA from Harvard University (1992) where he was a Baker Scholar. Venkatesan was awarded Purdue University's Outstanding Industrial Engineer award for the year 2000 and the Distinguished Alumnus award by the Indian Institute of Technology in 2003.
Venkatesan is a member of the Executive Council of NASSCOM, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a Director on the Board of Thermax Ltd and a member of the Advisory Council of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and IIIT-Bangalore. He has contributed frequently to the Harvard Business Review and some of his articles include, "Strategic Sourcing - to Make or Not to Make" and "The Strategy that Wouldn't Travel."
His interests include reading, travel, classical music and philanthropy.
Feb 13 2011