Sivaramakichenane Somasegar

Senior Vice President

Developer Division

Microsoft Corporation

S. Somasegar is currently the Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corporation. He has been an Officer of Microsoft Corporation since March 2000. Somasegar is the senior most Indian origin executive at Microsoft.

Somasegar and his team are primarily responsible for winning the hearts and minds of developers and designers from around the world and own driving the following product lines:

· Developer related programming languages (C#, VB, C/C++, Dynamic Languages) and the Visual Studio family of products spanning Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Team System.

· Developer platform technologies including the Common Language Run-time (CLR), .NET Framework, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, .NET Compact Framework and ASP.NET.

· Designer tools that include the Expression Studio family of products targeted at creative professional designers that work collaboratively with developers to build the next generation software application and web user experiences.

Under Somasegar’s leadership, the Visual Studio Tools and the .NET developer platform technologies have seen an incredible amount of momentum and adoption by developers around the world. Over 90% of the Fortune 100 and Global 100 companies are now using the Microsoft .NET platform for their most mission critical needs. Majority of the developers around the world are now using .NET and Visual Studio for their application development as a result.

Somasegar started the Designer Tools business at Microsoft whose mission is to build a suite of products in Microsoft Expression Studio targeted at the creative professionals. He has led the charge to build a set of products that enable developers and designers to collaborate in developing the next generation user experiences that is a clear business differentiator in today’s connected world.

Somasegar has been the biggest champion and one of the original architects of global distributed development at Microsoft. He created a vision for setting up a world-class R&D facility in India for Microsoft. His relentless energy, passion and drive were instrumental in Microsoft setting up a R&D facility in India (Hyderabad) back in 1998. He nurtured and grew this R&D facility from scratch to a world-class R&D facility of more than 1300 people today, with innovation resulting in over a 100 patents in the last 2 years. Over the last 9 years, Somasegar has continued to oversee and manage all the R&D operation in India for Microsoft in addition to his business responsibilities in Developer Division. Earlier this year, Somasegar set up the Microsoft Canada Development Center in Vancouver, Canada.

Somasegar began his career at Microsoft in 1989 as a software design engineer, and worked on eight different operating system releases: OS/2 2.0, four versions of Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. Most recently, he served as Corporate Vice President of the Windows Engineering Services and Solutions group within the Windows Division. Prior to that, he was the General Manager for the NT family of product releases.

Somasegar has won numerous awards for technology, management and business excellence. He also owns a couple of patents that have been awarded by the US Patents and Trademarks Office.

Somasegar has been a strong advocate of providing technology access to students and faculty in his alma mater, Anna University. He drove the creation and setting up of a .NET Center of Excellence that serves as a training ground for faculty and students on the latest and greatest technologies and also as a place for graduate students to work on their projects and thesis. Somasegar also was responsible for signing a University wide deal whereby students and faculty at the various Engineering colleges affiliated with Anna University had easy access to all the technologies and software from Microsoft. This was a first of its kind deal around the world that Microsoft signed with a large academic partner like Anna University that has over 450,000 students under its auspices.

Somasegar has been an advisor (member of the advisory board) to Avanade, a global IT consultancy company since February 2004. He frequently provides strategic advice to Avanade’s top management team on technology trends and adoption as well as potential market opportunities.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Somasegar was a Ph.D. student in Computer Engineering at the State University of New York in Buffalo. He holds a Master's in Computer Engineering from Louisiana State University (1988), USA and a Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Guindy Engineering College, Anna University, Chennai, India (1986).

In November 2006, Somasegar was awarded an Honorary Doctorate (honoris causa) degree by Anna University, India in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the field of Computer Science. Somasegar had the distinction of being the youngest person in the history of Anna University to have got the Honorary Doctorate degree at the age of 41.

Somasegar frequently shares his thoughts with the developer community via a web log on http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar. His blogs are translated into Chinese (http://blog.joycode.com/soma/) and Japanese (http://ameblo.jp/umesawaa). He is one of the top senior executives in the computer industry that blogs very frequently and he has a huge following in the US, in India, China, Japan and around the world. His blogs get more than a million page views per month.