Microsoft could lay off thousands in a major refocussing of its sales force software

The Dollar Business Bureau

Microsoft on Monday reorganised its sales force worldwide, which could result in layoff of thousands of employees.

According to reports in the media, citing sources, the Washington-based tech giant would hand over pink slips to “thousands” of its staff worldwide. The reorganising in the company includes simplifying the customer units to two segments only - enterprise and SME customers. The company is also establishing some new teams and is centralising tasks under other divisions.

Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has sought to cut the company’s focus on software and shift to cloud computing and other business services.

“From large multinationals to small and medium businesses to non-profits all over the world, organisations are using Microsoft’s cloud platforms to power their digital transformation,” Nadella said at the time of reporting of the company’s first quarter earnings of this year.

The US-based firm reported gains in the revenues of its cloud and business service business, which offset a decline from the operations of “personal computing” that includes the Windows operating system which is once a major contributor to its core business.

The restructuring looks to be an outcome of a change in company’s leadership last year. Executives Jean-Philippe Courtois and Judson Althoff took charge of the company’s marketing and sales divisions after the exit of COO Kevin Turner last year.

Althoff has criticised Microsoft’s earlier sales approach, which he described as an attempt for selling Azure, the company’s on-demand platform for computing power and software services.

The Washington-based tech giant has announced layoffs of thousands of jobs in the past few years, the most were being in 2014 when 18,000 positions were reduced related to the company’s acquisition of Nokia. The company had cut around 7,800 jobs in 2015 and 4,700 in 2016.

At March-end 2017, Microsoft employed around 121,500 people, which include 45,500 employees in Washington State. The overall figure includes 10,000 employees took over by Microsoft in its $27 billion acquisition of social networking site LinkedIn in December last year.