Microsoft Supreme Dalek Satya Nadella announced a broad reorganization of the company’s senior executive ranks as the outfit’s Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner is packing his office up into photocopy boxes.
Turner is leaving for new job CEO of the securities unit at financial-services firm Citadel. He leaves a hole in Vole Hill because he was the bloke responsible for setting up Microsoft’s global sales.
Instead of naming a new COO, Nadella appointed two executives to divvy up the sales responsibilities and report to him. Jean-Philippe Courtois will be in charge of global sales, marketing and operations spanning Microsoft’s 13 business areas, Nadella said in a note to employees Thursday. Judson Althoff will lead the worldwide commercial business, including government and small and medium-sized businesses.
Courtois has been with Microsoft for 32 years as an international sales executive at Microsoft, having run both Microsoft International and Microsoft EMEA previously. Althoff previously ran Microsoft North America and is a former Oracle executive.
Chris Capossela will take the worldwide marketing jon, Kurt DelBene leading IT and Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood taking over the sales and marketing team’s finance group, which had been separate.
Turner had bought the sales and operations organisations a discipline it had lacked and did well boosting the sales of enterprise software. But there was also declining sales growth in the final years of CEO Steve Ballmer’s reign as.
Turner was a candidate to replace Ballmer as CEO in 2014, but was passed over in favour of Nadella. He has been searching for a CEO job for several years we guess it was on his bucket list.
Nadella said that he and Turner had been discussing what needs to be done in sales and support to help Microsoft “continue to reach for the next level of customer centricity and obsession.”
To do that, Nadella said he decided to more closely embed Turner’s unit in the rest of the company. The reorganization dismantles what had become something of a parallel organization within Microsoft, where Turner had his own finance, marketing and communications staffs.
