Google to join teams working on Waze, Google Maps, to consolidate processes
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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) publicly confirmed that the teams that work on its mapping application Waze and other navigation software such as Google Maps would combine, starting December 9, as the company looks to fulfill CEO Sundar Pichai's mandate to become "20% more productive."
A Google spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that Waze will be integrated into Google Geo, which works on Maps, Earth and Street View, and is led by Christopher Phillips. The spokesperson added that Waze CEO Neha Parikh would leave the company after a transition period and that Waze, which has roughly 151M monthly active users around the world, would remain a standalone app.
The spokesperson also noted that no layoffs were planned as part of the consolidation.
Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) acquired Waze in June 2013 for $1.3B.
In September, Pichai, the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), said at the Code Conference that the company needed to streamline processes and consolidate in an effort to become more productive, hinting at job cuts.
"Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions," Pichai said at the widely watched conference.
"Sometimes there are areas to make progress [where] you have three people making decisions; understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%," Pichai added. 
On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) had been selected to participate, along with Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, in the Defense Department's widely anticipated $9B cloud contract.