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Ballmer Fills Key Executive Holes

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer named three new company presidents and reorganized two of the company's business units.

Ballmer today said he promoted Kurt DelBene, an 18-year company veteran to president of Microsoft Office Division, a move made in wake of the departure of Microsoft Business Division president Stephen Elop, who left the company last month to become CEO of Nokia.

DelBene most recently led the group's engineering and development teams, which included oversight of Office 2010, Ballmer told employees in an e-mail. As president, DelBene will have responsibility for engineering and marketing of Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync (formerly known as Office Communications Server), Project, Visio and the company's speech offerings, Ballmer noted.

"Building on the technical excellence and success of Office 2010, Kurt and his teams will focus on driving adoption of Office 2010, accelerating the adoption of our cloud productivity services, and envisioning and delivering our next generation of productivity solutions for both enterprise and consumer customers," Ballmer noted.

Ballmer added that Chris Capossela will continue to oversee marketing and product management and Amy Hood will continue to serve as the group's CFO, both reporting to DelBene.

Unlike Elop, DelBene will not have oversight of Microsoft's Dynamics product line. Ballmer will oversee the Microsoft Business Solutions Group, which will continue to be led by Kirill Tatarinov.

Ballmer also divided the mobile communications, gaming and entertainment division into two separate units. Ballmer named Andy Lees president of the new Mobile Communications Business and Don Mattrick, resident of the new Interactive Entertainment Business.

Robbie Bach had headed the two groups before they were split. Bach left the company in May after Microsoft abruptly walked away from its ill-fated Kin phone just slightly a month after releasing it.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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