Microsoft is expected to announce job cuts after the company releases its quarterly earnings on January 26. The job cuts will total about 700 and will be spread across the company’s many offices and numerous business units, according to Business Insider, which cited unidentified sources.
The cuts are likely part of the company’s previously announced plan to cut 2,850 jobs by June 2017.
Microsoft is in the midst of transitioning to a cloud model where it sells software on a subscription basis rather than licensing it to computers owned by its customers. It has also eliminated a number of employees that were part of its smartphone business that it gained as part of its 2013 acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone unit.
During Microsoft’s first-quarter fiscal earnings that it reported in October, the company said that the Microsoft Azure cloud revenues had more than doubled year-over-year. Azure revenues were up 116 percent, while Intelligent Cloud, the division that includes Azure, grew 8 percent to $6.4 billion.
The growth is partly due to Azure and other public clouds being used for production workloads, rather than just for test and development. And it is also part of the acceleration of a migration of many more enterprises into the cloud.
The company will announce its earnings on Thursday and analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect earnings per share of 78 cents on revenue of $25.27 billion. During its fiscal first quarter earnings, the company reported overall revenues of $20.5 billion and earnings per share of 76 cents.
For a tally of job cuts across the industry that occurred in 2016, see this SDxCentral feature.