12 most influential CEOs from India Worldwide

India has become the home to some of the most brilliant minds in world history. The country has also been a place where Asia's richest person lives.

Over the years, Indians have climbed up the corporate ladders globally and have also played a key role in the development of many of the technology powerhouses all over the world.

So here we look at the top CEOs of Indian origin in the world-----

Sanjay Mehrotra

Sanjay Mehrotra is an Indian American business executive and the CEO of Micron Technology. He was the co-founder of SanDisk, where he served as president and CEO until its acquisition by Western Digital in 2016. 

Formerly, he also held Design engineering designations in SEEQ Technology, Integrated Device Technology and most notably, Intel Corporation. Adjacently, he served as a member of the esteemed board of directors for Cavium from 2009 and 2018 and subsequently also served as a board member for Western Digital.  Presently he acts as the CEO of Micron Technology. He is also a patent holder of approximately 70 patents and has published numerous articles on flash memory systems and designs of non-volatile memory.

Sundar Pichai 

Pichai Sundararajan, better known as Sundar Pichai, is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google. 

Born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu Pichai pursued a degree in metallurgy at IIT Kharagpur and subsequently received a scholarship from Stanford University where he conducted his master's in engineering, upon finishing he decided to stay in the USA. Designated as the CEO of the fortune 500 company, Google on 10th August of 2015, Sundar Pichai adjacently serves as the CEO of Alphabet Inc. Initially, designated as the head of product management and development he was a pioneer in the development of the Chrome browser and subsequently as the Vice President of product development for a short stint to be repromoted as the Senior Vice President in 2012. Within another 2 years, he was designated as the chief of the products and monitored their dominant Android Operating System. 

Satya Nadella

Satyanarayana Nadella is an Indian-born American business executive. He is the executive chairman and CEO of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014 as CEO and John W. Thompson in 2021 as chairman.

A native of Hyderabad, currently residing in Washington, Satya Nadella achieved his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Mangalore University and masters from the University of Wisconsin. He further did a master's in business management from the University of Chicago. 

After becoming an employee in Microsoft in the year 1992, his leadership skills were quickly recognized as his versatile knowledge from the fundamentals of the technology to the business framework allowed him to develop numerous iconic products. His success led to his promotion to the Vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group were superseded the competition leading to a restructure of the fundamentals of the cloud infrastructure and service business. As the Vice President of Microsoft's Business division, Nadella also supervised the R&D of the online services division. He was inevitably promoted to CEO in the February of 2014,

Adjacently, Nadella is also a member of the board of trustees to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and his Alma mater, the University of Chicago.

Shantanu Narayen

Shantanu Narayen is an Indian American business executive. He has been the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Adobe Inc. since December 2007. Before this, he was the company's president and chief operating officer since 2005.

Born in Hyderabad, Shantanu pursued a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Osmania University, an MBA from the University of California and an MS from Bowling Green State University. He inaugurated his career with a developmental role at Apple. He also co-founded Pictra, a rudimentary picture sharing platform.  He previously served as a director for Dell afterwards left to join Adobe in 1998 as the Vice President of worldwide product research and was promoted to COO in 2005. Ultimately repromoted to become the CEO in 2007, Shantanu presently remains as the chairman, president and CEO. He currently has 5 patents.

Arvind Krishna

Arvind Krishna is an Indian-American business executive serving as Chairman and CEO of IBM. He has been the CEO of IBM since April 2020 and took on the role of Chairman & CEO in January 2021.

Arvind Krishna was born in Andhra Pradesh, India and achieved an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) and a PhD from the University of Illinois.

He founded the security software branch for IBM and pioneered the commercialization of the inaugural wireless system. While designated as the General Manager of Systems and Technology Group's development and the manufacturing organization, he restructured the fundamentals of data-centric systems which revaluated the industry benchmarks. He was also responsible for a 50% growth in IBM's Information Management business. As the Vice President of Cloud and Cognitive Software, he transmuted the company's software and cloud services by innovating their hybrid cloud business. Alongside Cloud services, he furthermore ushered numerous breakthroughs in unprecedented and rudimentary sectors of technology such as Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Blockchain, Data-Driven Solutions and Nanotechnology. 

Throughout his 30-year career presiding in IBM, his career may be highlighted by the company's most expensive procurement; Red Hat for $34 billion. At present, he serves as the Chairman and CEO of IBM.

Jayashree Ullal

Jayshree Ullal is an Indian-American billionaire businesswoman, president and CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company responsible for the deployment of 10/25/40/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet networking in the data center.

Jayashree Ullal achieved a bachelor's in electrical engineering and a master's degree in engineering management. 

Jayashree inaugurated her career as an employee of AMD with designations in engineering and strategy. Presently, with more than 30 years of experience in the networking industry, Jayashree supervises the business end as the CEO and President of Arista. She has pioneered the tectonic growth of the company from borderline nothing to a multibillion-dollar market-leading company. Formerly as a Vice President in Cisco, she was accountable for 10 billion dollars' worth of business in terms of a data center, switching and other relevant services. Jayashree is a laureate of multiple international awards including Forbes "one of the top five most influential people in the networking industry" and numerous as such.  

Dinesh Paliwal

Dinesh C. Paliwal is an Indian American business executive. He was the president and chief executive officer of Harman International, a provider of audio and infotainment systems for the automotive, consumer, and professional markets, from 2007 to 2020. Paliwal currently serves on Harman's board of directors.

Dinesh Paliwal hailing from Agra has achieved a master's degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Roorkee) and subsequently achieved master's degrees in applied science and Engineering and Business Management from Miami University.

Dinesh is famously known for serving as the CEO and President of Harman International as of 2007 and was swiftly appointed as the Chairman in July of 2008. He revolutionized the company's framework as he reassembled the Board of Members with more culturally versatile executives and entreated veteran management teams, which inadvertently expanded the company in many business avenues. Such alterations resulted in an astonishing $450 million in sustainable savings. 

Initially, He was the President and CEO of the multi-billion organization; ABB group, where he turned 18 successive years of losses to profitable margins. ABB's ventures took him to Beijing in 1994 where he grew the business multifold within the span of mere four years. After that short stint, ABB established its headquarters in Zurich. Not only was he the first Asian on the management board of ABB he was also tasked with running the global Automation division during the monumental turnover of 2002.

Nikesh Arora

Nikesh Arora is an Indian-American business executive. He is the chief executive officer and chairman of Palo Alto Networks. Arora was formerly a senior executive at Google. He served as the president of SoftBank Group from October 2014 to June 2016.

Nikesh Arora, born in Ghaziabad, achieved a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Institute of Technology at Banaras Hindu University and a center degree in Business Administration from Northeastern University and in Finance from Boston College.

Since June of 2018, he is the CEO and President of the leading company in independent cybersecurity known as Palo Alto Networks.  He is the former President and Chief Operating Officer of a global telecommunications and technology investing company known as SoftBank Group, which he resigned from in June of 2016. Previously, he held a legion of senior positions in the technology sector. Notably, he was the Vice President and the Chief business officer of Google.  

Neha Narkhede

Neha Narkhede is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and former CTO of Confluent, a streaming data technology company.

Born in Pune, Maharashtra, Neha Narkhede attended the University of Pune where she achieved her bachelor's in engineering and subsequently attended Georgia Tech for her Master's degree in Technology.  

As a LinkedIn Engineer, she contributed to the development of Apache Kafka, the open-sourced messaging system designed to handle the networking site's large-scale Data traffic. Previously, she led the teams Samza and Kafka which were responsible for the petabyte stream infrastructure of LinkedIn Being one of the inaugural engineers to pioneer the creation of Apache Kafka and is a committee member of PMC. Neha, along with two of her colleagues founded Confluent where she assumed the role of Head of Engineering. The company was built with the agenda to assist customers of Apache Kafka to process and organize their vast amounts of data. 

The company went public in 2021 with an evaluation of $9.1 Billion where she owns 8% of it.

Parag Agrawal 

Parag Agrawal is an Indian-American technology executive and the current chief technology officer of Twitter. He is responsible for Twitter's Technical Strategy, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Consumer, Revenue and Science teams.

An Indian American who attended the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay for his undergrad and completed his doctorate in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Parag Agrawal is currently the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Twitter and supervises fields in primarily technical strategy, Machine Learning, and consumer revenue. He is also responsible for the artificial intelligence department and respective Scientific teams. As of 2011, Parag has developed the Twitter Ads system with emphasis on scaling and user interaction of sponsored posts with regards to timeline relevancy. His prior large-scale data management experiences at companies like Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Research proved profitable for his current designation.

Anjali Sud

Anjali Sud is an American businesswoman of Indian descent and the CEO of Vimeo, the online video platform.

Anjali Sud did her B. Cs in Finance and business management from the University of Pennsylvania and received her MBA from the Prestigious Harvard Business School.

Sud initially joined Vimeo as an IAC Subsidiary, as the Head of Global marketing from which she was later promoted to General Manager where she restructured the framework of the company. As she revamped the company's hosting services and the capabilities of the tools, she led numerous launches such as membership plans, 360 video support and other powerful tools. Sue was ultimately appointed CEO in July of 2017 as they relocated their resources and attention towards software tools for content creation. Sud also supervised the proceedings of the procurement of Livestream and Magisto.

George Kurian

George Kurian attended Princeton University for his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and later attended Stanford University for his MBA.

Kurian was designated as the current CEO of NetApp in 2015 and presently is a board member as well. Kurian initially joined NetApp in 2011 as the Senior Vice President of Storage Solutions which entailed responsibilities for solutions portfolio and joint partner technology integration. When Kurian was still an Executive Vice President of Product Operations entailed the framework and strategic development of NetApp and its solutions portfolio.

Before his career in NetApp, Kurian was designated as the Senior Vice President of Data ONTAP Group and monitored the progress of their Operating System. Kurian was also the Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Application, Networking and Switching Technology Group. His Vice Presidency in Akamai Technologies, management consulting with McKinsey & Company and acting as the lead software engineer and product management for Oracle Corporation not only provided him with a myriad of experience but also resulted in him acquiring a diverse and versatile skill set.