Late last week word was spreading that Microsoft was planning a big Cloud First re-org for July 5th, right as employees at the Redmond giant come back from the July 4th holiday weekend. Well, it turns out that the company looks to be also reorganizing its sales division, reportedly set to lay off thousands of workers across the world as part of the change (via TechCrunch.)
According to multiple reports, the layoffs will occur in countries across the world, mainly because Microsoft is merging its enterprise customer unit together with the small and medium enterprise business unit. The move would make sense and comes right after Judson Althoff and Jean-Philippe Courtois moved into positions at Microsoft’s sales and marketing divisions, potentially putting more internal emphasis on the sales of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.
Layoffs at this time of the year are not uncommon at Microsoft, especially because the company’s fiscal year ends on June 30th. The software giant, though, is riding the momentum from its cloud division, and Microsoft’s executive vice president of the Worldwide Commercial Business organization, Judson Althoff, has been critical of the company’s sales approaches in the past.
Microsoft has not commented on these reports, but the company may announce the changes this coming week. Given the last round of Microsoft job cuts were themed towards mobile, the latest layoffs are another signal of the end of the mobile-first, cloud-first days at Microsoft, hinting that the company is perhaps putting more of an emphasis on its cloud divisions.