Nadella's first major shake-up leads to exit of Microsoft's four top executives

In the first major shake-up since Satya Nadella took over as the chief executive of Microsoft in February 2014, four of its top executives will be exiting the firm.

Nadella sent out a mail to the employees on Wednesday informing them about his decision and the names of the four top executives, who will be leaving the company, which he said was in an effort to re-organize the firm's groups, a New York Times report said.

The top executives who will be leaving the company are Stephen Elop, a former chief executive of Nokia , who heads the devices group at Microsoft; Eric Rudder, who heads the advanced technology and education initiatives, Kirill Tatarinov, who heads the business solutions group; and Microsoft chief strategy officer Mark Penn.

Nadella in the e-mail to the employees said that re-organizing the groups will help in deliver the products to the customers in a more time-efficient manner. He also informed that Penn had informed him of his plans to leave the company in the month of September as he wants to open a private equity firm.

Elop's group will now be combined with Windows and devices group headed by Terry Myerson. Tatarinov's group will be merged with cloud and enterprise headed by Scott Guthrie and Rudder's group will be combined with applications and services group headed by Qi Lu.