Nadella delivers a fresh org chart as Microsoft restructures

The re-shaping of Microsoft under Satya Nadella's leadership continues with resellers planning to attend next months worldwide partner conference getting just a couple of weeks to get familiar with the latest structure.

Since he took the helm as CEO several well known names have left Microsoft and now a few more are joining the leavers list as the firm lines up behind three main divisions.

The most well known is former Nokia boss Stephen Elop who exits the firm along with Kirill Tatarinov, who had been leading the Dynamics business and activities in the CRM and ERP markets, as well as Microsoft veteran Eric Rudder and marketing executive Mark Penn.

But it is the strategy going forward that will be of more interest to the channel with Nadella updating staff with the latest roadmap on where the vendor is heading.

In his memo Nadella restated the three ambitions that are underpinning its cloud and mobile first world approach and these are going to be repeated plenty of times at next month's WPC - reinvent productivity and business processes, build the intelligent cloud platform and to create more personal computing.

Speaking to MicroScope earlier this month Microsoft's channel chief Phil Sorgen said that it would be expanding on the themes at WPC and encouraging resellers to develop their own businesses, advising them to develop their own intellectual property.

The Nadella memo comes a couple of years after his predecessor Steve Ballmer rolled out a major re-organisation to position the firm for the future and he gave the rationale for the latest moves to staff.

"To better align our capabilities and, ultimately, deliver better products and services our customers love at a more rapid pace, I have decided to organize our engineering effort into three groups that work together to deliver on our strategy and ambitions," he wrote.

The Windows and Devices Group will be headed by Terry Myerson and will pull together the operating systems unit and the devices business that had been handled by Elop. Nadella wants to get Windows into a position where it works across all of its devices from the Surface to the Xbox, "This enables us to create new categories while generating enthusiasm and demand for Windows broadly".

The second area is the cloud and enterprise operation, which will be headed by Scott Guthrie, and is tasked with developing infrastructure and business services for the commercial market and will get the business intelligence Dynamics portfolio also brought into the group.

Qi Lu will continue to lead the Applications and Services Group that is tasked with reinventing productivity but it will also be handed responsibility for the vendor's efforts in the education market.

"Our competition and our customers don’t care about our organization structure — they care about innovation. While we are distinctly aligning our engineering structure and core capabilities, our ambitions are interconnected. Success requires all of us — and particularly the Senior Leadership Team — to work across boundaries as one Microsoft and in harmony with our partners," commented Nadella.

"I’m certain that matching our structure to our strategy will best position us to build products and services our customers love and ultimately drive new growth," he added.

Since Nadella joined marketing executive Tami Reller, who back in the day was a constant source of Windows OS updates, plus former Skype boss Tony Bates have left the business and the vendor has been forced to make significant staff cuts as well.

Last summer, Microsoft announced the deepest cuts to its workforce in its history as it revealed plans to cut 18,000 staff, with the bulk of those (12,500) coming from professional and factory positions eliminated through the alignment of the Nokia business with the main Microsoft operations.

Those cuts were scheduled to have been completed by the end of this month and were very much driven by Nadella as he started to emerge from the shadow of the Ballmer era and position the firm for the future, trimming the fat and consolidating the Nokia business.