Cloud giant Microsoft has announced it will offer new services in the United Kingdom, despite laying off staff globally. Microsoft has global headquarters in Redmond, Washington, United States and UK headquarters in Reading in the south of England. It is one of the leading cloud providers, offering Office 365 (a cloud based version of its famous communication and collaboration solutions) and Microsoft Azure, its cloud storage and cloud compute option. The company has announced 3,000 job losses globally as the company realigns to focusing on the cloud. An announcement about the layoffs was made 6 July, 2017 and the company immediately started notifying staff. As a result of Microsoft’s sharper ‘Mobile First, Cloud First’ focus, its main business activity is now selling software application subscriptions rather than direct software sales. As a result, the bulk of the job losses will impact the company’s sales staff. Microsoft employs more than 115,000 in the United States, but 121,500 people globally.
The company confirmed the bulk of those laid off will be outside the United States. Despite this, Andres Juarez, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft’s Global Ecosystem, stated in a blog post that a number of new services will be offered to customers in the UK. These include the Azure Container Service, Azure Log Analytics, SQL Threat Detection and Azure Stream Analytics - a managed event processing engine.
“We are excited about these additions, and invite customers using the UK Azure region to try them today,” suggested Mr. Juarez. “The UK region is the first Azure region featuring Docker Swarm mode instead of legacy Swarm”.
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