UW-Milwaukee: Microsoft executive receives the UWM Chancellor’s Innovator Award April 9

4/8/2013

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MILWAUKEE – Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Corporation’s Server and Tools Business (STB) and an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), will be presented the UWM Chancellor’s Innovator Award at a luncheon ceremony at the University Club on Tuesday, April 9.

Nadella (’90 MS computer science) is the second recipient of the award, which recognizes UWM alumni whose careers have redefined the word “innovation” in ways that acknowledge the wide possibilities that exist when knowledge, creativity and imagination converge.

Later, at 2 p.m., Nadella will give the Distinguished Lecture at the UWM College of Engineering & Applied Science. The talk, “Era of the Cloud OS,” will be on campus in room East 250 of the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences (EMS) building, 3200 N. Cramer St. The talk will focus on the world of cloud services and new application patterns that are driving the need for a “Cloud OS.” Nadella will discuss the trends and new ideas that are changing the way applications are developed, and what will be needed to succeed in this new era.

Nadella oversees a $19 billion division that builds and runs the company’s computing platforms, developer tools and cloud services. His team delivers the Cloud OS – Microsoft’s next-generation back-end platform that spans private, public and service cloud providers and is capable of running at global, multi-datacenter scale. Today, businesses everywhere depend on the products that make up the Cloud OS to meet their most challenging and critical computing needs, including Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center and Windows Azure.

Prior to STB, Nadella was senior vice president of R&D for Microsoft’s Online Services Division, which includes the Search (Bing), Portal (MSN) and Advertising platforms. In that role, he was responsible for the technical vision and engineering behind some of the largest cloud infrastructure on the planet, serving hundreds of millions of customers each day as well as providing advertisers with a scalable search-and-display platform for connecting with their customers.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1992, he was a member of the technology staff at Sun Microsystems Inc. A native of Hyderabad, India, Nadella also has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Mangalore University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The first Chancellor’s Innovation Award was presented on Nov. 8, 2011, to Steven A. Burd, (’73 MA economics), chairman, president and chief executive officer of Safeway Inc.

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