Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a big staff reorganization intended to boost sales of cloud services.

Microsoft announced the changes in an internal memo, according to several reports. Although the software giant typically does reorganizations in July at the start of a new fiscal year, this one is focused on the company’s sales organization, aimed at improving the way it sells its cloud services and software. Several reports say layoffs could result, possibly thousands, but the memo doesn’t mention them.

The memo obtained by Geekwire and others details a number of changes to the sales organization. One overarching change is simplifying customers into two buckets: enterprise and small, medium-sized and corporate, known as SMC. The memo was sent by Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s executive vice president of worldwide commercial business; Jean-Philippe Courtois, executive vice president of global sales, marketing and operations; and Chris Capossela, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of marketing and consumer business.

More specifically, the enterprise teams will be focused on six main industries — manufacturing, financial services, retail, health, education and government — and sales teams in those areas will focus on modern workplace, business applications and apps and infrastructure solutions, according to Geekwire. The memo also called out Microsoft’s “Digital Win Room,” a special group that’s designed to “touch some of the biggest opportunities around the world as nimbly as possible.”

“This is classic ‘Get more focused resources working on the new stuff,’” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “In other words, getting more people focused on cloud and Dynamics versus some of the standalone products. I believe this will enable Microsoft to better address cloud-native products, services and customers.”

The move follows a number of organizational changes introduced in January affecting Microsoft’s sales and marketing teams. That reshuffle saw several of those teams move under the command of Altoff.

Bloomberg said the latest reorganization could see Microsoft announce substantial layoffs, but a later report from ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley said the number of jobs to be cut may not be so big and instead Microsoft will attempt to reassign as many affected staff members as possible.

Foley said Altoff has been focused on getting Microsoft’s sales teams to prioritize selling Azure and other cloud services. Most of the company’s sales force is more used to selling software for personal computers and servers, but Microsoft’s new strategy places more priority on persuading customers to buy cloud services hosted in its data centers.

Now, Microsoft wants to accelerate this transformation in an effort to catch up with Amazon Web Services Inc., which is currently the leader in public cloud infrastructure services. To that end, the company is said to have been working on newer ways to sell support services in order to up their overall spend.

Last month Microsoft quietly reshuffled several teams working in its cloud, enterprise and artificial intelligence research units. That move was aimed at consolidating some of the company’s cloud and AI business units under a new Cloud AI Platform business which will encompass Azure Search, Azure Machine Learning, the Microsoft Bot Framework, R Server and the Algorithms and Data Science Solution team.

The latest reorganization comes as Microsoft readies for its annual worldwide partner conference Inspire, which will take place in Washington D.C. on July 9.

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