Washington – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wasn’t kidding yesterday during his keynote that the company needed to get leaner. Nadella announced on the last day of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference that he is reducing the workforce by 18,000 jobs. Of those 18,000 positions 13,000 are from Nokia.
According to a reliable source outside the company there will be no layoffs at the Canadian subsidiary. CDN is checking with Microsoft Canada officials to confirm this; so this story will be updated.
The 18,000 workforce reduction amounts to 14 per cent of its global headcount and is the largest in the company’s history. Former CEO Steve Ballmer had to make a significant reduction in 2009 because of the recession, but that was about 5,000 layoffs. One source told CDN that Microsoft’s workforce is at 120,000 people.
A published report stated that a good chunk of the layoffs from the Microsoft side would be at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters.
Nadella, during his keynote at WPC 2014 in Washington, said that the company needed to get leaner not just internally but with its channel partner ecosystem. Several partners told CDN that this comment meant increasing speed to market.
Nadella said that his plan is to go after every screen out there regardless of size.
“Our aspiration is to have one or many Microsoft icons, Microsoft digital experiences. They’re all entry points for us as an ecosystem. So that means we get to have an opportunity to be able to have anyone entering from any device into our ecosystem. That’s our promise with which we’ll move forward,” he said.
Another part of Nadella’s plan is to position Microsoft through the channel as the only company able to build enterprise-grade infrastructure that meets the realities of the geopolitics of the world and the regulatory regimes of the world.
“We need to give them the hyper-scale economics. So that means we are the company that can provide the data centre back plane for all computing needs of a complex enterprise whether its private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud,” he said.
