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TECH GIANT MICROSOFT is planning to cut jobs worldwide – with one US outlet reporting as many as 3,000 jobs are to go at the company.
However, sources here have told TheJournal.ie that the effect on Irish jobs will be minimal.
Earlier this year Microsoft announced that it is to create 600 jobs as part of a major investment in Ireland bringing its Dublin-based workforce up to 1,800.
Microsoft said yesterday it would cut an unspecified number of jobs amid reports that US tech giant was reorganising its global sales operations.
“Today, we are taking steps to notify some employees that their jobs are under consideration or that their positions will be eliminated,” Microsoft told AFP.
Earlier, CNBC television said the company would be cutting some 3,000 positions, mostly from its non-US sales staff.
A Microsoft spokesperson would not respond to queries on how many jobs would be affected here. However, TheJournal.ie understands that the impact on Irish-based staff will be minimal.
The layoffs come as the US software giant refocuses its sales force on making Microsoft a pivotal part of businesses relying on cloud computing.
“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 other,” the company said in a statement.
Microsoft had more than 121,000 employees worldwide at the end of March, according to its website.
Additional staff in Ireland
Microsoft announced in February that it is to create 600 jobs as part of its investment here. The company immediately started hiring 500 people at its newly established EMEA Inside Sales Centre in Dublin.
The further 100 jobs were scheduled to be added to existing finance, operations, engineering and sales departments. These figures would bring the number of Microsoft staff in Dublin up to 1,800.
Microsoft Ireland is also set to move into a new campus in Leopardstown before the end of the year, in a €134 million investment in the company.
Tech overhaul
Global Equities research analyst Trip Chowdhry said layoffs such as those taking place at Microsoft as symptoms of a technology industry undergoing a “major overhaul” caused by a shift to computing and online services being hosted in the internet cloud.
“At companies transitioning from the old world to the new world you will see layoffs accelerate; it’s a slow and gradual and painful experience for them.”
Microsoft has been shifting to a cloud-based model under Nadella, as the industry moves away from packaged software that once was the core of its business.
The tech company said revenue from its “Intelligent Cloud” rose 11% from a year earlier to $6.8 billion.
It is to release its earnings for the recently ended quarter on 20 July.
Microsoft cut 7,800 jobs in 2015, and 4,700 last year.
- With reporting by AFP
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Global tech companies are always hiring and firing, it’s the nature of the business. Things change so fast that a strategy which seemed sound a year ago may be obsolete today, necessitating downsizing in some functional areas and hiring in others.
@John D: a growing business needs to downsize? Wrong. Cut backs equal more profit.
@Shane Kenny: who uses Microsoft products these days ?
@Boganity: Lots. Businesses are huge consumers of Microsoft’s on-premises and cloud services, and the latter is growing at a huge pace. MS is letting Apple and Google have the mobile handset … the stuff that powers them is more and more likely to reside in Microsoft’s data centers, and the comms/collaboration/data of businesses are more than likely in their data centers too. Where you and I store our tiny photo collections and what brand of phone we use is irrelevant in the grand scale of things.
@Aidan Finn: Actually you will find the stuff that powers (or empowers) them is decidely not in MS datacenters. AWS is miles ahead for cloud based and SAAS systems with their own infrastructure will be predominantly linux based.
They’ve just invested a huge amount on a new campus in leopardstown Dublin. And most large tech companies operating in Europe have a decent portion of their sales hub here because of the availability of multilingual degree educated people. Irish MS jobs won’t suffer a huge amount.
(Cont’d) In the medium term
“refocuses its sales force on making Microsoft a pivotal part of businesses relying on cloud computing”
Surely after they bought and killed Nokia, failing with mobile system who can’t even open youtube videos. Surely with Windows 8 and 10 which made lot of people move to Apple instead of learning new systems from the scratch. Surely with Linked in which they turn into internal corporational tool not to use by average people. Big corporations is their last resort.
@cortisola: a lot of surely’s there, surely.
It’s about half and half really with MS and Unix/Linux.
VM’s from MS are still ahead because applications are still ahead on MS servers.
Linux is coming up fast though.
The lack of a good GUI is holding Linux back.
have your say