In the current Internet age, retaining a top-level executive at your company is one of the toughest jobs other than growing your business and competition with arch-enemies. Today, Rajiv Sodhi, the vice president and managing director at GoDaddy India has departed the company after submitting his resignation. He is moving on from his current role at the internet domain registrar to rejoin Microsoft and lead its cloud and server business, starting this December.
Back in June 2012, Sodhi joined GoDaddy after spending a good ten years heading the sales and marketing efforts of the cloud and software business at the Indian offices of Microsoft. Due to rapid growth in internet users in the country, he had only been focused on spreading their brand among SMB’s and bridging the digital divide.
Also, Sodhi is prominently recognized for setting up GoDaddy’s India operations and scaling them to introduce products and services in regional languages. It also introduced other localized payment options to woo businesses their way. Under his leadership, the company also launched its own cloud servers and applications for developers to quickly build, test and scale cloud solutions. No one even aware of the domain registrar in the country about five years ago but the catchy and regular adverts created traction for the company.
Prior to joining GoDaddy, Sodhi was positioned as “Director – India SMB, Cloud and Software Sales through Distribution and Reseller Channel Management.” He was responsible for channel-led sales, and geographic expansion of the cloud business which was in its nascent stage during those years. Now, this return to Microsoft will be like a homecoming for Sodhi. He will predominantly responsible for leading the company’s cloud business and compete with AWS, who is its primary competitor in the cloud space in India. Microsoft has also built robust cloud technologies, like Azure, Sharepoint and other Exchange or server solutions.
