Microsoft Shakes Up Leadership, Dynamics Teams

Microsoft announced a new leadership structure and strategy Wednesday that includes the departure of four top executives, the movement of Dynamics development teams to the Cloud and Enterprise group, and the creation of a new group combining its Windows and device businesses.

CEO Satya Nadella announced the realignment in an email to employees, explaining: “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.”

Most notably of those teams is the new Windows and Devices Group (WDG), combining the Operating Systems Group and Microsoft Devices Group. The latter was led by Stephen Elop, who returned to Microsoft in 2014 after nearly four years as president and CEO of Nokia, and is one of the departing executives. The WDG will be led by EVP Terry Myerson.

Joining the departing Elop is SVP Eric Rudder; Mark Penn, EVP of advertising and strategy; and Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft Business Solutions and head of the Dynamics business.

“Under Kirill’s leadership, the Dynamics business has grown to a nearly $2 billion business with an ambitious wave of products on the horizon,” Nadella wrote. “Perhaps most important though, Kirill and team have shown us that participating in a meaningful way in the CRM and ERP market opens up new opportunities we can uniquely take advantage of by bringing Dynamics into Microsoft’s mainstream engineering, sales and marketing efforts. I am very thankful for Kirill’s unswerving leadership in bringing Dynamics to this point and building a strong leadership team to carry it forward.”

The Dynamics team, now working under the Cloud and Enterprise Group led by Scott Guthrie, will serve to accelerate the company’s ERP and CRM efforts and “mainstream them as part of our core engineering and innovation efforts.”

The third group Nadella outlined is the Applications and Services Group, which will continue to be led by Qi Lu and focused on productivity services for digital work across all devices.

“I’m counting on our Senior Leadership Team to inspire innovative products and services and lead excellent execution,” Nadella wrote. “Our competition and our customers don’t care about our organization structure — they care about innovation.”

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