Microsoft’s Panay Now Controls Engineering for Premium Hardware

Microsoft (MSFT) quietly has assigned more responsibility to Panos Panay, its Surface corporate vice president, following Steven Elop’s exit in the vendor’s recent top management reshuffling.

A month ago Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella instituted a wide-ranging structural overhaul and named a new 12-person senior leadership team that handed more responsibility to Windows head Terry Myerson and showed the door to Elop, head of its devices business who returned to the company after it completed its buyout of Nokia last year.

The overhaul combined engineering from the OS Group and Devices under the newly-cast Windows and Devices Group headed by Myerson–merging Windows with hardware, namely Surface tablets, Lumia smartphones, HoloLens, Surface Hub, Band and Xbox.

And, it’s Panay, an 11-year company veteran, who’s emerged to little fanfare as the head of engineering for premium hardware–Surface, Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface Hub, Band and HoloLens, as ZDNet reported.

While Panay wasn’t named as one of Nadella’s top lieutenants, his name has come up far more publicly in the past few months than previously. And, he’s been quoted a lot more often in the press. So maybe we should have figured it out that his role had expanded, as ZDNet did.

Apparently, Panay’s wider duties were announced internally last week, the report said. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the news, saying Panay “will be taking over (engineering for) premium devices.”

Along with Panay, there were some additional below-the-radar changes that came along with Microsoft’s recent restructuring.

Microsoft will consolidate its OneDrive/SharePoint and Outlook/Exchange teams along with the Office 365 and Yammer groups, all of which will be overseen by Rajesh Jha, Microsoft corporate vice president, according to the ZDNet report, which relied on internal emails for information.

Jeff Teper will handle OneDrive/SharePoint and report to Jha, the report said. Javier Soltero is now Corporate Vice President of program management for Outlook. He replaces Harve Bhela, who is moving to the Windows and Devices Group, taking over for David Treadwell, who has a new role on Microsoft’s Cloud & Enterprise team, the report said.