Anandan will steer its sales, marketing and services business in India. He will join on September 1 and report to Ravi Venkatesan, chairman of Microsoft India.

Microsoft India has also announced Jaspreet Bindra as the head of its entertainment and devices division in India.  

Ironically, Dhawan's exit was the second senior management departure in June � the first that of Anandan, who said he would be returning to the US to pursue plans outside Dell. Instead, he got poached by Microsoft.

Anandan had been working with Dell since 2003 in various capacities. During his tenure as country head for the company in India, Dell India's business grew from $250 million to over $800 million.

"Microsoft as a company has shaped the evolution of the global computing industry over the past 30 years, and is poised to play a leading role in the coming decade too. I am thrilled to be joining the Microsoft India team at such an exciting time," Anandan said.

"Rajan Anandan is a result-oriented and goal-driven person. One reason for the success of Dell in India has been certain initiatives he took. He is one of the biggest reasons for the way Dell is perceived in India. He understood the market and brought in localisation. His appointment will help Microsoft tremendously as currently,  their objective is to increase PC penetration and reduce piracy level of its solutions. This requires out-of-the-box thinking and aggressiveness, which he has demonstarted at Dell," opines Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst, Gartner.

The layer of top-100 people in most companies is still limited. This is the reason why achievers are finding better opportunities within the sector and most of them consider it as a natural career progression," said an analyst wishing not to be named.

Incidentally, Neelam Dhawan's exit from Microsoft came amid India and three other countries' opposition to International Organisation for Standardisation's decision to declare software developers Office Open XML file format as an international standard.