HRM584 - Managing Organizational Change
Week 1
Topic Selection

&

This paper introduces a comparison of the organizational changes that Microsoft and VMware have recently undergone. The overall focus will be around the new Microsoft CEO and the job cuts announced recently (Nadella, Rigby 2014) and VMware’s job cuts and the refocus efforts (Leske, 2013) and how these changes helped them to become stronger to meet the market demands.
I am very interested in these 2 companies because I worked for Microsoft nearly for 12 years, and I am currently working for VMware for the past 2 years. They both compete in the Cloud Computing industry. Microsoft focuses on Office 365 and Azure clouds to deliver on its core: the “productivity and platform” company (Nadella, 2014) –public clouds. VMware, however, focuses on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the whole notion of software defined datacenter (SDDC), i.e. private cloud with a recent focus on vCloud Air, which is the public cloud.
With the relevantly new VMware CEO (Pat Gelsinger) and the job-cuts decision to become laser focused on three key businesses within the company: Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), End User Computing, and vCloud Air. In other words, the focus is on how to build private clouds in your datacenter out of software (e.g. virtual servers, virtual storage, and virtual network), how to virtualize the desktop experience, and how to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) out of a public cloud. Similarly, with Satya Nadella (new Microsoft CEO) and the decision around 18,000 job-cuts, the refocus was on transforming the productivity to be delivered as a cloud and mobile service along with the platform for IT organizations.

References
Nadella, Satya (2014, July 10). Starting FY15 - Bold Ambition & Our Core. Retrieved from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/ceo/index.html