Microsoft announced Wednesday it is laying off as many as 3,000 employees, according to CNBC.
The job cuts, which will likely terminate less than 10 percent of the complete sales team, are part of larger restructuring at the tech conglomerate. Reports of the layoffs have arisen several times in the past few weeks, but a general number was not yet known.
The Seattle Times reported Monday that the organizational changes stem from Microsoft’s alleged desire to emphasize its cloud-computing products, rather than licensing for its traditional software. The sales growth for Microsoft’s cloud business has been vastly improving in recent months and year. Its specific cloud service product, Azure, increased 93 percent last quarter, according to CNBC.
Cloud computing is a network of remote servers based on the internet that allows almost all of the same technical capabilities like storage and processing data, but without the use of a personal computer or server.
“Microsoft is implementing changes to better serve our customers and partners,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Daily Caller News Foundation (TheDCNF). “Today, we are taking steps to notify some employees that their jobs are under consideration or that their positions will be eliminated. Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time-to-time, re-deployment in others.”
The company is likely trying to gain some further traction in the cloud services market by refocusing and reconfiguring resources and human talent, as Amazon relatively outshines others in the field.
Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has gotten so popular that Walmart essentially threatened other tech companies to not run apps on Amazon’s platform if they want to do business.
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