Microsoft is reportedly planning massive layoffs, set to announce thousands of job cuts this week in a bid to restructure its salesforce.
The purported job cuts will reportedly be worldwide, as the company intends to lay off thousands of workers globally. Microsoft already started an internal reorganization back in January this year and the upcoming layoffs will apparently be the next step moving forward.
Microsoft Job Cuts And Restructuring
As TechCrunch reports, Microsoft could announce the layoffs this week. The publication says it got the tip from a source familiar with the company's downsizing plans.
"The restructuring is set to include an organizational merger that involves its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its SME-focused divisions," says TechCrunch. SME stands for small- and-medium-sized enterprise.
The purported layoffs set for this week would come just as Microsoft ends one fiscal year and enters another. The company has previously announced workforce changes at the beginning of a new fiscal year.
Microsoft To Focus More On The Cloud
This is not the first time that news of Microsoft layoffs hit the surface. Just a few days ago, several publications including Bloomberg reported that Microsoft had massive job cuts in the cards, tied to its efforts to focus more on cloud services within its global sales teams. More specifically, the company reportedly plans to improve how it sells its cloud services and software worldwide. Bloomberg noted that the move would mark the biggest sales force restructuring in years.
On the other hand, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reports that some of her sources indicate that in fact Microsoft may not lay off too many people as part of reorganization, but rather reassign some in a sort of reshuffling. Bloomberg, meanwhile, says the job cuts will affect the Worldwide Commercial Business led by Judson Althoff and Jean-Philippe Courtois, who took over Microsoft's sales and marketing group after veteran COO Kevin Turner left last year. Althoff previously criticized Microsoft's earlier sales strategies and plans to focus more on Azure going forward.
For a long time, Microsoft has trained its sales force to convince customers to buy software for their desktops and servers. In this day and age, however, it has become paramount to get customers on board with cloud services Microsoft hosts in its data centers. Microsoft's cloud business has proved to be impressively lucrative and the company wants to bank on this trend, boosting adoption to increase revenue and better compete against Amazon, which is currently leading the cloud market.
Microsoft has yet to make any statements on the matter, but the company has been restructuring its businesses for a while. It laid off 7,800 employees back in 2015, made another 1,850 job cuts last year, and two months later it announced an additional 2,850 job cuts, at least 900 of which were from its sales department.
If the latest reports turn out to be accurate and Microsoft does indeed plan to announce more layoffs this week, the company should make an official announcement soon enough. As always, we'll keep you up to date as soon as more information becomes available.
