Bob Muglia (born 1959) is an American business executive and research and development specialist. He was formerly the Chief Executive Officer of

Snowflake Computing Snowflake Inc. is an American cloud-based data storage company. Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, it operates a platform that allows for data analysis and simultaneous access of data sets with minimal latency. It operates on Amazon Web Se ...

, a data warehousing startup. Muglia is known for managing divisions at Microsoft that supported the

Microsoft Office Suite Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDE ...

Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a brand name for Server (computing), server-oriented releases of the Windows NT operating system (OS) that have been developed by Microsoft since 1993. The first release under this brand name i ...

and MSN Network product families. He was one of four presidents that reported directly to Microsoft CEO

Steve Ballmer Steven Anthony Ballmer (; March 24, 1956) is an American businessman and investor who served as chief executive officer of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. He is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He i ...

. Muglia held several executive positions at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

before resigning from the company in 2011. He worked briefly for

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including Router (computing), routers, Network switch, switches, network management so ...

, then accepted his position as CEO of Snowflake Computing in June 2014.

Early life

Bob Muglia was born in 1959 in Connecticut. His father was an automotive parts salesman. Muglia started working at his first job when he was 15 years old. He moved to Michigan and earned an undergraduate degree from the

University of Michigan The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

in 1981. After graduating, he started working for

ROLM ROLM Corporation was a Silicon Valley technology company founded in 1969 by four electrical engineers: Gene Richeson, Ken Oshman, Walter Loewenstern, and Robert Maxfield. The company is best known for creating a computerized telephone switchi ...

Corporation.

Career

Microsoft

Windows and business software

Bob Muglia started his Microsoft career in 1988. He was the first

product manager A product manager (PM) is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the product strategy behind a product (physical or digital), ...

for SQL Server. Muglia also served as the director of Windows NT Program Management and User Education. He was promoted to vice president of the Windows NT division in October 1995. Muglia later held the position of vice president of the Server Application group, until he was promoted to senior vice president of the Applications and Tools group in February 1998. Bob Muglia was influential in a corporate restructuring at Microsoft in 1999, which assigned business divisions to customer types, rather than technologies. As part of the re-structuring, Muglia became head of the business-productivity group, which oversaw Microsoft Office, Exchange and other business software. According to ''Computer Reseller News'', Muglia pushed developers to visit customers, created customer advisory boards and led other efforts to incorporate customer input into product development at Microsoft. Muglia testified in the ''

United States v. Microsoft Corp. ''United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation'', 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001), was a landmark American antitrust law case at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The U.S. government accused Microsoft of ...

'' antitrust lawsuit, and in a case between Microsoft and

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

regarding Microsoft's use of Java. According to ''New York Times'' reporters Steve Lohr and Koel Brinkley, the judge embarrassed Muglia by rebuking him for his persistent characterization of an email from

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

. Muglia also negotiated aggressively with

RealNetworks RealNetworks LLC is an American technology company and provider of Internet streaming media delivery software and services based in Seattle, Washington. The company also provides subscription-based online entertainment services and mobile enter ...

, regarding an antitrust dispute between the two companies. In August 2000, Muglia was appointed to vice president of a new .NET Services Group. The following year he was reassigned to focus on database technologies as senior vice president of the Enterprise Storage Services Group. He helped develop Microsoft's plan for

autonomic computing Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-management (computer science), self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Initiated by IBM in 2001 ...

, which was announced in March 2003. By early 2004, Muglia held the position of senior vice president of the Windows Server Division.

Servers and tools division

Another re-organization at Microsoft in 2005 resulted in Muglia taking the position of Senior Vice President of Servers and Tools before being promoted to president of the division in 2009. This made Muglia one of four presidents at Microsoft. During his tenure, the business group grew its revenues more than ten percent each year for six years. The division accounted for more than 20 percent of Microsoft's revenues by January 2009. In this position, Muglia led Microsoft's ten-year plan for data center and desktop automation products, its Dynamic Systems Initiative and its Dynamic IT strategy. In October 2010, developers criticized Muglia for suggesting Microsoft would put less emphasis on

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later version ...

; a statement he later retracted. Muglia announced his resignation from Microsoft in January 2011; he was replaced by

Satya Nadella Satya Narayana Nadella (; born 19 August 1967) is an Indian-born American business executive who is the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014 as CEO and John W. Thompson in 2021 as chairman. B ...

, now Microsoft's CEO. He was the fourth executive reporting directly to Microsoft CEO

to resign between early 2010 and 2011. According to ''Financial Times'', Ballmer credited Muglia for growing the servers and tools division, but implied the departure was related to disagreements between the two executives about the company's

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

strategy.

Juniper

In July 2011, a few months prior to Muglia's last day at Microsoft,

announced it would hire Muglia as the executive vice president of its software division. He reported to then Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson, who (along with other Juniper staff) is also a former Microsoft executive. Muglia was hired to consolidate Juniper's software groups under a new division called Software Solutions. He also helped develop Juniper's

software-defined networking Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to network management that uses abstraction to enable dynamic and programmatically efficient network configuration to create grouping and segmentation while improving network performance and monit ...

(SDN) strategy. In December 2013 Muglia quit Juniper, a month after

Shaygan Kheradpir Shaygan Kheradpir (; born December 19, 1960) is an American businessman and technology executive. Kheradpir holds a bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree in electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline co ...

was appointed as the company's new CEO. Several other Juniper executives also left around this time.

Snowflake computing

Bob Muglia was Chief Executive Officer of

, a cloud-based data-warehousing startup until April 2019. He joined the company in June 2014, a couple years after it was founded in 2012. Snowflake Computing came out of

stealth mode In business, stealth mode is a company's temporary state of secretiveness, either in total stealth mode when everything about the company is kept secret, or in-company stealth mode which is usually undertaken to avoid alerting competitors to a pen ...

that October.

References

External links

Official bio
{{DEFAULTSORT:Muglia, Bob American technology chief executives 1959 births Living people Microsoft employees Businesspeople from Connecticut University of Michigan alumni