Microsoft's Developer Division Reorganised

Developers..Developers..Developers..,the buzz word for Microsoft across all the time since its inception. Microsoft is a platform company, so its extremely important to focus on developers. There are number of platforms such as Windows Client, Windows Server, Office, Sharepoint,  Xbox, Silverlight,etc within Microsoft. Today Microsoft have announced the reorganisation of the developer efforts across the company to better improve the business. As part of the reorg, the Developer Tools Marketing and the Developer Platform & Evangelism will merge into Developer Division which is again is a part of Server and Tools division led by newly appointed Satya Nadella of Bing fame.

Another important executive change is that, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Clients platform will now be moved into Azure Application Platform team. So we can no longer watch red polo keynotes at Silverlight or Windows Phone keynotes. 🙁

Find the full memo sent to Microsoft employees after the break.

Source: All About Microsoft

From: S. Somasegar
Subject: Increasing our focus on
developers
Last month at MIX 11, we showcased the Microsoft platform opportunity to
developers.  This included showing incredible HTML5 experiences with IE9 on
Windows 7, the runtime and tooling improvements we are making with the next
release of Windows Phone, shipping the great new Silverlight 5 Beta, the
excellent work we are delivering with WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC, Orchard and
Windows Azure, and some amazing new Kinect development experiences that we will
be enabling shortly.  There is only more to come.  I’m very eagerly waiting for
the developer conference this September, where we will have a lot of exciting
new things to show and tell our developer customers.
As Satya (Nadella) mentions, we are making a number of organizational
changes in DevDiv that are intended to set us up for even more success in
attracting developers to Microsoft platforms and in gaining leadership position
in cloud computing.
•    Consolidating developer tools marketing and evangelism functions
into the DevDiv organization. This change will enable us to work together more
tightly to build the right products, as well as to market, evangelize and sell
them the right way. This enables us to continue to be the champions for the
developer audience at Microsoft and work closely with the platform teams to
deliver a compelling developer story. As part of this change, the Developer
Tools Marketing and the Developer Platform & Evangelism organizations will
be merging with DevDiv as follows:
o    The Developer Platform & Evangelism team led by Walid Abu-Hadba
will report directly to me. I have known Walid for many years now and have
worked closely with him ever since he came into DPE and I am excited to have
Walid and the DPE team join us. The Student Evangelism team, led by Jon Perera
will be joining DPE from Microsoft Office Division and will continue their focus
and charter of winning the hearts and minds of students and the academic
community.
o    The Developer Tools Marketing team, including the Product
Management team led by Dave Mendlen, the Outbound Developer team led by Angus
Norton, the Developer Business team led by Kara Westhusing, the Developer
Tracker Survey run by Maureen Hughes, and the Silverlight Marketing team, will
report to Mitra Azizirad. Mitra has been with the company for 19 years in a
variety of business and strategic leadership roles and has been a leader in
helping us be a $1B+ tools business. Mitra brings a vast amount of field, sales
and marketing as well as corporate experience to the team.  Mitra will join my
leadership team and continue to report to Walid.
•    Sharpening our Focus around Azure and Cloud Computing. Azure and the
cloud are incredibly important initiatives that will play a huge role in the
future success of STB and the company.  Given the strategic importance of Cloud
Computing for STB and Microsoft, we need a strong leader to help drive the
development of our Cloud Application Platform and help us win developers for
Azure. We’ve asked Scott Guthrie to take on this challenge and lead the Azure
Application Platform team that will report to Ted Kummert in BPD. This team will
combine the Web Platform & Tools team led by Bill Staples, the Application
Server Group led by Abhay Parasnis and the Portal and Lightweight Role teams
from the Windows Azure team.  Scott’s transition is bittersweet for me. I
personally will miss him very much, but I’m confident that Scott will bring
tremendous value to our application platform.  With Scott’s current organization
finishing up important milestones, the timing is right for Scott to take on this
role.
With Scott’s transition, the Client Platform team led by Kevin Gallo will
report directly to me and will continue its focus on the awesome work that the
team is doing for the different Microsoft platforms.  The .NET Core Platform
team led by Ian Carmichael will report to Jason Zander which will bring the
managed languages and runtime work closer together.  Patrick Dussud will report
to Ian Carmichael and will continue being the technical leader for
.NET.
•    Taking the next step in the evolution of our Technical Computing
engineering team. The team has made significant progress in the two years since
its foundation in its goals to make Windows platform the best and most widely
used environment for compute and data intensive parallel applications. Kyril’s
strong leadership in jumpstarting our High Performance and Technical Computing
work has enabled us to take the next step in its evolution with the goal of
making its technologies mainstream by aligning them with the appropriate tools
and platform teams.  These changes will be effective in June, when the team
finishes its current set of development milestones:
o    Parallel Computing and Tools led by Steve Teixeira, David Callahan
and Shahrokh Mortazavi will move to a combined WinC++, PCP, and UX organization
under Mohsen.
o    High Performance Computing led by Ryan Waite will move to
the Windows Azure organization and report to Bill Laing.
o    Workbench
Compute Services led by Mark Schnitzer will move to the Business Platform
Division and report to Dave Campbell.
o    TC China team lead by George Yan
will sharpen its focus on HPC and will report to Ryan Waite.
o    Kyril
Faenov will report to Satya with a charter to drive start-ups and other rapidly
growing workloads to the cloud as well as looking at key innovations to help
Microsoft continue its advance in the cloud.
The changes we are announcing today will help us focus and execute on our
developer strategy more effectively to attract developers to Microsoft platforms
and drive platform pull-through. With engineering, marketing and evangelism
working together even more closely, we will also be able to execute better on
our plans to drive usage of our developer tools more broadly and grow to a $2B+
business.
Please join me in welcoming Walid and the DPE team and the developer
tools marketing team as well as congratulating Scott, Kyril and Mitra on their
new roles and responsibilities. I want to thank Scott for his incredible
contributions to DevDiv over the last 12 years and wish him all the very best in
his new role and know that DevDiv will be cheering him to help us win on the
cloud. I want to thank Kyril for his leadership in creating and nurturing
Technical Computing and helping us set it up to be more mainstream moving
forward.
Attached is the new organization chart that reflects my direct reports
and highlights any changes with their direct reports. You will hear from your
leader on the specifics if there are any changes in your organization.
We have a lot of exciting and important deliverables in the next 6-12
months that the teams are working towards. Please stay focused on your
commitments and deliverables as the work you are doing is critical for the
success of our platforms.  Let your manager or me know if you have any
questions.
-somasegar