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(Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. is changing how it reports revenue and operating income, ahead of its quarterly results next month, reducing the number of financial segments to three major units from seven.

Microsoft will group sales into Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud and More Personal Computing, the Redmond, Washington-based company said Monday in a statement. A fourth, smaller bucket, called Corporate and Other, also will be used, said Cameron Bays, a spokeswoman for the company. That’s down from the current seven distinct sections.
Sales from Office and Office 365, along with Dynamics, the company’s Salesforce.com Inc. competitor, will go into the first group. Infrastructure tools such as the Windows Azure cloud and SQL Server software will go into the second. More Personal Computing will pull in the products that typical consumers touch, ranging from the Windows operating system to Surface tablets and the Xbox gaming console. Corporate and Other includes certain revenue deferrals.

Microsoft said it will release segment information for fiscal 2014 and 2015, as if reported under the new operating segment structure, on Tuesday. The company’s fiscal first quarter 2016 results using the new revenue structure will be released Oct. 22.
The new segments “reflect the company’s strategy and ambitions to build best-in-class platforms and productivity services for a mobile-first, cloud-first world,” according to the statement.

Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has sought to move away from an emphasis on software for single-use cases and shift Microsoft into a company that supplies platforms, rather than point products.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jack Clark in San Francisco at jclark185@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net Andrew Pollack, Reed Stevenson