Under fire from angry shareholders and rocked by a stream of high-profile executive departures, embattled Yahoo on Thursday announced another reorganization, its latest attempt to snap out of its years-long technology and financial funk.
Stressing its goals of being the "starting point" for most Web users and a "must buy" for most online advertisers, as well as the most attractive platform for developers, Yahoo will now centralize its product development operations.
It will also create a business region just for the U.S. and its end-users, advertisers and Web publishers. In addition, Yahoo will form what it calls an "insights strategy team" and enhance its technology infrastructure so that product designers and engineers will communicate and collaborate better.
"These moves accelerate the ability of our deep and talented team to build great products, grow our audiences and improve monetization globally," said Jerry Yang, Yahoo's CEO, in a statement.
Reporting to President Sue Decker will be three new teams:
-- the Audience Products Division, which will oversee product strategy and product management and will be led by Ash Patel, former manager of Yahoo's Platforms & Infrastructure group;
-- the U.S. region, which will be led by Hilary Schneider, previously chief of the company's Global Partner Solutions group; and
-- Insights Strategy, which is in charge of centralizing and executing "a common strategy for the use of data and analysis across Yahoo," and the chief of which will be named later.
The new organizational structure will improve Yahoo's products and speed up decisions, the company said.
In technology and infrastructure, Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh will be in charge of developing a "world class" cloud computing and storage infrastructure, unifying platforms and improving the communication between product developers and engineers.
As a result, Yahoo will create a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, and move all the teams that work on end-user services and sites to the Audience Technology Group under the guidance of Venkat Panchapakesan.
The reorganization also calls for Prabhakar Raghavan to direct search strategy and Tuoc Luong to act as interim chief of the search product team. David Ku will be in charge of the Advertising Technology Group for search.
The reorganization will not touch Yahoo's Marketing Products Division, Connected Life and Corporate Marketing groups.
This reorganization is the latest of several major ones that the company has implemented in the past 18 months or so, and comes at a thorny time, as Yahoo deals with the aftermath of the failed attempt by Microsoft to acquire it.
The three-month pursuit, which ended in early May, has led shareholders to sue the company, saying its directors and managers failed in their fiduciary duty to shareholders by, allegedly, sabotaging Microsoft's acquisition attempt. Investor Carl Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of candidates to oust Yahoo's current board. In addition, Yahoo has seen many high-profile executives abandon the company in the past two months.
Read up on the latest ideas and technologies from companies that sell hardware, software and services. Taking On Demand CRM Integration to the Next Level
Data grids and service-oriented architecture
Best Practice in Building an Integrated Information Management Strategy
Everything you need to know about email and web security (but were afraid to ask)
Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management: Trends for Emerging Businesses
Achieving the impossible: Unlimited application scalability
Mimosa™ NearPoint™ for Microsoft® Exchange Server: Email Archiving 101
How to improve employee productivity in small and medium businesses
Zones provide focussed content from Computerworld and leading technology partners.Discover how SOA can create smarter outcomes for your business.
Attend and learn:
- How SOA is helping leading companies to become more agile
- Where you should be applying SOA processes in your company
- The top SOA implementation mistakes to avoid
Click here for more information.
- +
Computerworld Live Podcast #97: The Future of Enterprise Networking 25/07/2008 09:45:36
This week CW Live chats with Mark Thompson, global sales and marketing manager for HP ProCurve, on the future of the enterprise networking. Mark discusses the trends we can expect to see in the near future and how the right infrastructure can ensure your enterprise network is secure. - +
Computerworld Live Podcast #96: Security at the Edge 11/06/2008 09:22:22
CW Live speaks with Amol Mitra, HP ProCurve Director of Marketing for Asia Pacific and Japan. Today's topic: how enterprises are starting to shift away from simply controlling security via server logins, firewalls and moving to more adaptive security frameworks. - +
Data Management Edition #10: Multi-Petascale Systems 02/05/2008 09:12:33
This week we look at sustainability and the development of multicore technologies to build multi-petascale systems. - +
IT Security Edition #11: How to poison the Storm botnet 01/05/2008 08:51:55
This week CW Live presents a case study on how to poison the notorious Storm botnet . Plus we take a look at Cisco's plans for Ironport. - +
IT Security Edition #10: Cyber-battles fought and won 24/04/2008 11:09:47
Vendors bow to end user pressure to improve product security, and we take a look at the latest concepts shaping the cyber-battlefield of the future.
Borderless corporate networks to shift focus to secure content management in Australia in 2009 2008-12-04 16:06:00+11
IDC Says Asia/Pacific Excluding Japan IT Market Will Remain The Bright Spot... 2008-12-04 15:04:00+11
MySpot SOS "Panic Button" Smartphone Application could save lone worker lives 2008-12-04 13:34:00+11
Charles Sturt University Commences Unified Communications Deployment With Interactive Intelligence 2008-12-04 08:30:00+11
AOC Launches 18.5” Widescreen Green 16:9 LCD Monitor in Australia and New Zealand 2008-12-03 15:30:00+11
Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management: Trends for Emerging Businesses
Hyperion surveyed 163 companies to understand BI and EPM requirements, evaluation processes, and extent of adoption. Top areas of current and future investment for emerging businesses include budgeting and planning as well as management reporting solutions. Read on to discover more.












