Adam Selipsky, CEO, Tableau Software
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Amazon has chosen to lead Adam Selipsky, currently CEO of Tableau, Salesforce’s data visualization software maker, to lead its Amazon Web Services division. Andy Jassy, the current head of AWS and the person chosen to replace Jeff Bezos as the head of all of Amazon, informed employees in an email Tuesday.
Selipsky is one of the people several insiders identified as a possible successor to Jassy. Selipsky held a prominent position within AWS, as vice president of sales, marketing, and support, before leaving to run the then-public Tableau in 2016. Salesforce bought Tableau for $ 15.7 billion in 2019.
The role that Selipsky left at Amazon was vacant for years. Last year, AWS executive Matt Garman, who had worked on AWS ‘core EC2 virtual computing service, chose to take over the role.
Selipsky was seen as a rising star in Salesforce after the acquisition of Tableau. At an event hosted by Goldman Sachs in January, the bank’s CEO David Solomon asked Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to name something that investors don’t fully appreciate in his company. As part of his response, Benioff named a number of top executives.
We “have so many other CEOs in our midst, such as Adam Selipsky, Tableau’s CEO,” said Benioff. “Soon we will have Stewart, CEO of Slack,” he added, referring to Stewart Butterfield. Selipsky has remained President and CEO of Tableau since the acquisition. Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment about who will be running Tableau.
Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins responded to a question about the Tableau integration in December. He said, “It is a best-in-class, unique asset in the world. Great leadership team, great CEO with Adam Selipsky and the management team.”
Selipsky joined Amazon in 2005, a year before the company introduced EC2 and the S3 storage service, and stayed there for 11 years. He was previously a vice president at RealNetworks.
A copy of the memo will follow. Amazon later confirmed the move in a blog post.
I want to share that Adam Selipsky will be the next CEO of AWS.
Adam is not a new face for AWS. In 2005, Adam was one of the first VPs we hired at AWS, and he led AWS sales, marketing, and support for 11 years (as well as some other areas such as our AWS Platform services for a while). Adam then became Tableau’s CEO in 2016 and has led Tableau for the past 4.5 years. Tableau enjoyed significant success during Adam’s time as CEO – the company’s value quadrupled in just a few years, Tableau transitioned from perpetual to subscription licensing through a fundamental business model change, and the company was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2019. of the largest software acquisitions in history. Following the acquisition, Adam remained Tableau’s CEO and was part of Salesforce’s Executive Leadership Team.
Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation and CEO experience to an already strong AWS leadership team. And because he has held such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and our company well.
With a $ 51 billion revenue return growing 28% year on year (these were the fourth quarter 2020 numbers we last shared publicly), it’s easy to forget that AWS is still in its very early stages from what is possible. Currently, less than 5% of global IT spending takes place in the cloud. That will change substantially in the coming years. We have a lot more to come up with for clients, and we have a very strong leadership team and group of builders to get it done. I am excited about what lies ahead.
Andy
PS Adam returns to AWS on May 17. We will transition together over the next few weeks before implementing the change sometime in Q3.
This is the latest news. Please check again for updates.
– CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.