A massive restructuring is soon expected to hit Microsoft, which can largely impact its sales, as well as marketing teams. The company’s new aim is to focus the majority of its attention to cloud-based services.
Because of this, thousands of layoffs are expected, and the final announcement concerning the company’s and employee’s future will come today.
On Monday, July 3rd, employees have received an internal memo that says that commercial sales teams are going to split up. From now, they will target two distinct segments. One of them is for medium and corporate entities, while the other one is for enterprises and small businesses.
Those working in sales will now have six industries to focus on, and those are financial, manufacturing, education, retail, government, and health. As for software sale, there will be four different categories for each: business apps, AI, modern workplace, and infrastructure.
According to the memo, these changes are supposed to take advantage of future opportunities. Basically, they are made in order to help Microsoft to win when it comes to the consumer market. The official announcement concerning the company’s plans for the future will reveal the rest later today.
As for the cloud offerings, they are tied to Microsoft’s primary services and products. This includes Windows operating system, as well as business and personal software like OneDrive, or Office 365.
With the new changes, however, the cloud system will be put in the center of the focus, and Microsoft’s Azure will easily be able to compete with AWS or Google Cloud. The sales team’s strategy will also start focusing on providing cloud services from now on.
This has all the potential to offer highly-lucrative resizable cloud compute capacity. It is expected to be very tempting to businesses that are developing machine learning, or have tons of data for analysis.
The memo has also mentioned that the company is planning on growing a ‘thriving partner infrastructure’. It is supposed to be supported by Office 365, Windows devices, Xbox, and Surface. Basically, Microsoft’s plan is to build a completely new ecosystem with the cloud as its focus. This will be enabled by collaborations with different third-party vendors, and it will emulate its competitors.
An ecosystem like this will also help with launching Microsoft’s own IoT devices, as well as voice control devices, and even mixed reality devices like HoloLens.
Firmware updates will be much easier to deliver if everything is connected. This includes absolutely everything Microsoft-related, from their billboards to ATMs. Security boosts would be done in record time, and many threats would be dealt within minutes, if not prevented by default. This includes DDoS attacks, creating IoT botnets, or ransomware and malware attacks like Petya or WannaCry.
The bad side of this is that the changes will likely result in thousands of cuts. The company employs over 121,567 workers around the globe, and a change like this is sure to shake everything up.
The biggest impact is expected to be felt at Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business. However, the company is confident enough, and the memo states that they have listened carefully what all parties have to say. This includes partners, customers, as well as their own employees. With the data that was recorded and carefully analyzed, the company believes that they can now safely, but still boldly, chart a new path forward.
