Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is leaving Microsoft, following a senior leadership shake-up in Redmond.
Revealed to employees via email, the tech giant has laid out changes to its core team of leaders, in a bid to drive engineering alignment against the company’s core focus of reinventing productivity and building more intelligent cloud platforms.
“We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions,” says Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.
“This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace.”
Following a transition period, Elop will leave the company he joined just over twelve months ago, following Microsoft’s $US7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia in April 2014.
"Stephen and I have agreed that now is the right time for him to retire from Microsoft,” Nadella adds.
“I regret the loss of leadership that this represents, and look forward to seeing where his next destination will be.”
Unrelated to the engineering restructuring changes, Chief Insights Officer, Mark Penn, has also decided to pursue another venture outside Microsoft and will be leaving the company in September.
Notable for Microsoft’s highly criticised Scroogled campaign, Penn leaves the Redmond ranks to form a private equity fund, with media speculation also rife that executive may reenter the political environment for the upcoming presidential campaigns in the US.
In other high-level changes, executive Vice President Terry Myerson will lead a newly formed team, Windows and Devices Group (WDG), focused on enabling more personal computing experiences powered by the Windows ecosystem.
According to Nadella, this new team combines the engineering efforts of the current Operating Systems Group and Microsoft Devices Group.
Also, executive Vice President, Scott Guthrie, will continue to lead the Cloud and Enterprise (C+E) team focused on building the intelligent cloud platform that powers any application on any device.
The C+E team will also focus on building high-value infrastructure and business services that are key to managing business processes, especially in the areas of data and analytics, security and management, and development tools.
As a part of this announcement, the company will move the Dynamics development teams to the C+E team, enabling the company to accelerate ERP and CRM work and bring it into the mainstream C+E engineering and innovation efforts.
Finally, executive Vice President Qi Lu will continue to lead the Applications and Services Group (ASG) focused on reinventing productivity services for digital work that span all devices and appeal to the people who use technology at work and in their personal lives.
As a result of the organisational moves, Elop, Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder will leave Microsoft after a designated transition period.
- Following these changes, Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team totals 12 executives:
- Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer
- Chris Capossela, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
- Kurt DelBene, Executive Vice President, Corporate Strategy and Planning
- Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise
- Amy Hood, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
- Kathleen Hogan, Executive Vice President, Human Resources
- Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President, Business Development
- Qi Lu, Executive Vice President, Applications and Services Group
- Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President, Windows and Devices Group
- Harry Shum, Executive Vice President, Technology and Research
- Brad Smith, Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Legal and Corporate Affairs
- Kevin Turner, Chief Operating Officer