COO Kevin Turner Remains Microsoft's Highest-Paid Exec For Fifth Straight Year

Despite missing out on the CEO job at Microsoft, COO Kevin Turner was still able to maintain his title as the company's highest-paid executive for the fifth consecutive year.

Turner, a nine-year Microsoft veteran who oversees worldwide sales, marketing , services, support and channel partners, made just over $12.6 million during the vendor's fiscal 2014, which ended in June, according to a proxy filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In addition to a base salary of $796,667, Microsoft paid Turner a cash bonus of more than $2.8 million -- which was 130 percent of his target incentive -- along with an annual stock award of $8,985,207.

[Related: Microsoft COO Kevin Turner Is The Man Who Would Not Be King]

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Microsoft credited Turner with making "strong progress" in cloud computing, which included 116 percent revenue growth in its commercial cloud segment driven by sales of Office 365 and an overall doubling of cloud revenue.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was the company's second-highest paid executive during fiscal 2014, bringing in $11,612,483. This included a base salary of $918,917 and an annual stock award of $7,093,566.

Nadella received a bonus of $3.6 million, 141 percent of his target, for a year in which he spent 7 months leading Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise business before being named CEO.

Nadella was also awarded $79.78 million in stock grants that count as fiscal 2014 compensation, but most of that won't be under his control until 2019.

Turner has a huge scope of duties at Microsoft and had close ties with former CEO Steve Ballmer, who pushed unsuccessfully for him to be named his successor, according to a Vanity Fair report earlier this month.

But when Nadella spoke earlier this year about wanting to change Microsoft's culture, many partners hoped this would translate into a diminished role for Turner, whose intense focus on performance metrics is said to be unpopular with some employees.

While Microsoft has described Turner as a "strong advocate" for the channel who meets with thousands of partners every year, some partners have told CRN they feel Turner's cost-cutting ways have made it more difficult for them to work with the vendor.

Turner, who was previously CIO at Walmart and CEO of its Sam's Club subsidiary, earlier this year was mentioned as a potential successor to Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel, who stepped down in May after the company was hit with a massive credit card data breach.

"Kevin Turner, the [COO] of Microsoft would be an interesting choice for Target," Paula Rosenblum, managing partner at Retail Systems Research, told CNN in May.

PUBLISHED OCT. 21, 2014