Microsoft Is Planning Sales Reorganization Focused on Cloud

It has announced quite a few job cuts in the last few years, the most talked about being 18,000 positions removed in 2014. The company had 121,567 employees as of March 31.

The restructuring will merge its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its divisions and is expected to be announced in the coming week, according to an anonymous source cited by TechCrunch. Althoff works with partners to spread the adoption of Microsoft technology, while Courtois leads global sales, marketing, and services for 122 subsidiaries worldwide. It’s not exactly clear what changes are in the pipeline, but an email from Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s executive vice president of worldwide commercial business, says sales reorganization is created to “align the right resources for the right customer at the right time”.

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft was planning a reorganization of its sales group in order to focus more intently on its growing cloud computing business.

With the reorganization, the enterprise sales teams will focus on selling Microsoft software and services to six industries: education, government, retail, health, manufacturing, and financial services.

Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. While its traditional buy-once software business is still huge, sales have been declining as the cloud business erodes its growth.

With this data in mind, it is no surprise that CEO Satya Nadella is looking to shift Microsoft’s focus from software to cloud and business services.

The reports are in line with Microsoft’s announcement last August, when it revealed plans to cull 2,850 global sales staff.

The job cuts have yet to be confirmed, but it won’t be the first time Microsoft has reduced its headcount in recent years.

Microsoft is moving fast to build out its web-based, on-demand computing business to compete with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.com, a cloud-infrastructure pioneer.

“Given the Windows 10 Creators Update provides the latest security protections to help keep you safe, we want to help update your device as soon as possible”, Cable said.