Google has announced that they are combining their Maps team with the Waze team and plans to have the integration completed later this year. The merger comes as the search engine giant feels pressure to cut costs, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Waze’s team of over 500 employees will convert to a Google company come Friday. The company’s current CEO, Neha Parikh, will be stepping down.
Google told The Wall Street Journal that they plan to keep Waze as a standalone service. It’s known for crowdsourcing real-time and historical traffic data like speed camera locations, radar traps and accidents.
Google also said they did not foresee any layoffs with this restructure. However, layoffs are commonplace in the IT world and happen a lot, no matter how big your company or organization is. Google said they expect the restructuring of the different mapping services to reduce overlap in mapmaking.
Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said he hopes to make the company 20% more productive by running “with fewer resources.” Speaking at Code Conference in September, Pichai said that one of the reasons the company is slower is because of overhiring. He hinted that merging teams which work on overlapping issues would help them stay on top.
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