Microsoft shakes up its sales org: Reports began emerging just prior to the U.S. holiday weekend that Microsoft was about to undertake a major reorganization of its sales force with an eye on shifting emphasis toward cloud sales. The timing coincides with the end of Redmond's fiscal year on June 30. While Microsoft itself has been fairly mum about the details, it did confirm changes are being made "to better serve our customers and partners."
Geekwire obtained a copy of an internal memo outlining those changes, which are set to be rolled out as soon as this week. The major ones include a business model segmentation into enterprise and SMC (small, medium and corporate) customers. Microsoft is also aligning enterprise sales teams around six verticals, which include manufacturing, financial services, retail, health, education and government, according to the site.
POV: It's hard to run a business these days without some level of interaction with Microsoft, and that means these organizational changes could be widely felt. It's also no surprise that Microsoft is trying to re-orient sales around cloud. But this type of reorg is standard for Redmond as it begins each new fiscal year, so time will tell if the changes are lasting or prove to be merely experimental. Constellation will have more on the Microsoft reorganization later this week.
Baidu makes more big moves in AI: While Chinese Internet giant Baidu is still mostly a consumer-focused company, one of many reasons to keep tabs on it from an enterprise perspective is its ongoing investments in artificial intelligence. Just a few months after unveiling Project Apollo, an open-source platform for autonomous vehicles, Baidu has announced that more than 50 partners have joined the ecosystem. They include car manufacturers such as Ford and Daimler; suppliers such as Bosch, NVIDIA and TomTom; and ridesharing companies, startups and universities.
Baidu's intentions for Apollo are grand. COO and group vice president Qi Lu, a former key executive at Microsoft, termed Apollo "the 'Android' of the autonomous driving industry," yet more open than the mobile OS, as Venturebeat reports.
Meanwhile, Baidu also announced the acquisition of Kitt.ai, a Seattle-based chatbot platform startup. Kitt.ai has more than 12,000 developers already using its Snowboy hotword detection service, with products deployed in smartphone apps, cars, homes and other locations, according to a company blog post.
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd takes a grilling: Oracle recently held a media day at its Redwood Shores, Calif. headquarters and as part of the event, CEO Mark Hurd was interviewed at length by Recode's Kara Swisher and then took questions from analysts and journalists in attendance. The result was one of the livelier sets of interactions you'll see between a top vendor executive and the ink-stained classes.
Now Recode has helpfully provided a full transcript of the event, which is well worth a read. Sure, Hurd gets in his talking points and manages to get in some of his trademark filibustering, but for the most part he's kept on his toes.
Legacy watch: The IT industry's 'working dead': Technologies come and go in the IT industry, and with them related careers and job roles. CIO.com has published a must-read feature (note: registratin required) on some of the latest tech gigs on the chopping block. The list has some usual suspects, such as COBOL programmers, that we suspect will be able to survive much longer than they have already. Still, the post is full of smart observations such as this one from James Stanger of industry group CompTIA:
“The IT jobs I see threatened are the repetitive ones and those that focus on only one type of OS or vendor system,” he says. “Today it’s not about the vendor or OS; it’s about where the information resides and how useful you are at storing, manipulating, and securing that information. It's all about connecting multiple systems now.”
Subscribe today for unrestricted access to expert analyst views on breaking news.
