Microsoft cuts 200 from commercial sales team as move to the cloud continues

There is unfortunate news is surfacing about Microsoft cutting loose 200 jobs from its commercial sales business.

As disheartening as it can be to report about job loss, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft sources are claiming that the company is set to release some 200 jobs following a continued effort by the company to reorganize its Worldwide Commercial Business division.

That division is charged with selling arguably Microsoft’s most prized possession these days, cloud and digital services to customers and partners.

Back in January of 2019, Microsoft announced a reorg change to its WCB led by its vice president Judson Altoff, who brought in other top billers such as Azure Compute head Corey Sanders and VP of cybersecurity solutions group Norm Judah among others, to help simplify the division’s organizational structure.

Despite his role in helping to reorg Microsoft’s commercial sales business, it looks like Judah is among the 200 to be let go of this round of job cuts. Judah wasn’t the only high-profile employee to be let go this week as Foley reports that corporate VP of worldwide customer successes John Jester, and VP of Microsoft enterprise Anand Eswaran will be ‘considering his next opportunity’ following the job cuts.

While Microsoft has yet to publicly acknowledge this weeks job loss, Foley has heard that the company may be doing smaller job cuts such as these going forward rather than their previously headline-grabbing massive downsizing efforts.

I asked Microsoft for comment and was told by a spokesperson the company had nothing to say. But I’ve heard this is yet another of the regular “reallocation of resources” kind of things that happen periodically at Microsoft, rather than a precursor to another big round of layoffs.

As with any story dealing with the lively hood of employees, we hope for the best of these workers and that Microsoft is at the end of implementing its business reorg, for some time.