Microsoft appoints Anil Bhansali as MD of R&D operations in India

Microsoft has promoted Anil Bhansali as the managing director of Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt Ltd, as well as the leader of its development center in the country. Prior to the appointment, Bhansali was the general manager of cloud and enterprise engineering teams at the Microsoft India Development Center (MSIDC). He will continue to be based out of Hyderabad.

Amit Chatterjee, who is currently MSIDC leader, will relocate to the company’s Redmond (the US) headquarters.

On Bhansali’s appointment, S Somasegar, corporate VP, developer division at Microsoft Corporation said, “Bhansali brings with him an understanding of Microsoft, its culture and an appreciation of the aspects of distributed development. I am confident that under his leadership, MSIDC will continue its role in Microsoft’s distributed development strategy.”

Anil is a 22-year veteran with Microsoft and has been with the company since 1991. He spent the first 12 years of his career in Redmond, where he started out as part of the Office division where he worked on MS Excel for multiple releases. He relocated to India in 2003 as director of the Windows Live Platforms Services Group. He also established and drove several engineering efforts at MSIDC before taking over the engineering leadership of the Windows feature engineering group within MSIDC in 2006.

He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from State University of New York at Stony Brook (the US).

The MSIDC of Microsoft India (R&D) started operations in Hyderabad in 1998 with about 20 people. Today, it has over 2,000 employees making it one of Microsoft’s largest development centers outside the US. The MSIDC team in India currently works closely with product engineering teams from Microsoft Corporation’s headquarters at Redmond for five out of the seven business divisions at Microsoft Corporation, namely Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS), Microsoft Office Division (MOD), Cloud and Enterprise Group, Online Services Division (OSD) and Windows.

In June this year, Microsoft had appointed Karan Bajwa as the new MD of its sales and marketing group (SMSG), basically making him the head of Microsoft Corporation India Pvt Ltd. Bajwa had joined Microsoft five years ago and was earlier working as the head of its enterprise business in India. Sanket Akerkar, who was MD at the time, also relocated to the US to take up another assignment within the firm.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)