In an email to employees Wednesday, Microsoft announced changes to its Senior Leadership Team to drive engineering alignment against the company’s ambitions: reinvent productivity and business processes, build the intelligent cloud platform, and create more personal computing. "We are aligning our engineering efforts and capabilities to deliver on our strategy and, in particular, our three core ambitions," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. "This change will enable us to deliver better products and services that our customers love at a more rapid pace."

Changes to the Senior Leadership Team include the following:

Executive Vice President Terry Myerson will lead a newly formed team, Windows and Devices Group (WDG), focused on enabling more personal computing experiences powered by the Windows ecosystem. This new team combines the engineering efforts of the current Operating Systems Group and Microsoft Devices Group.

Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie will continue to lead the Cloud and Enterprise (C+E) team focused on building the intelligent cloud platform that powers any application on any device. The C+E team will also focus on building infrastructure and business services that are key to managing business processes, especially in the areas of data and analytics, security and management, and development tools. As a part of this announcement, the company will move the Dynamics development teams to the C+E team, enabling the company to accelerate ERP and CRM work and bring it into the mainstream C+E engineering and innovation efforts.

Executive Vice President Qi Lu will continue to lead the Applications and Services Group (ASG) focused on productivity services for digital work that span all devices.

As a result of the organizational moves, former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, Kirill Tatarinov and Eric Rudder will leave Microsoft after a designated transition period. Chief Insights Officer Mark Penn has also decided to pursue another venture outside Microsoft and will be leaving the company in September.

Elop's exit comes about a year after Microsoft bought Nokia's cellphome and services division for about $7.5 billion.