Amazon’s cloud business has appointed Adam Selipsky as its new CEO

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His hiring is part of a major leadership transition at Amazon AMZN after founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced in February that he would assume the role of executive chairman later this year, to be replaced as CEO by Andy Jassy, ​​the current head of Amazon Web Services. The ascension plan cemented the importance of AWS to the internet giant’s future – and raised big questions about who would take over.

Selipsky was CEO of cloud data company Tableau for the past five years, during which time the company’s value quadrupled before being acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for $ 15.7 billion.

Before that, he held a number of senior positions at AWS. Selipsky was hired as one of the company’s first vice presidents in 2005 after starting just two years earlier, and led sales, marketing and support at AWS for 11 years, according to a letter Jassy sent to AWS employees Tuesday. .

However, Selipsky is not one of several internal executives that analysts predicted would land the top job, including Matt Garman, AWS’s top sales and marketing manager.

“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation and CEO experience to an already strong AWS leadership team,” Jassy said in the letter. “And having held such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and our company well.”

Selipsky will return to Amazon on May 17 and will switch several weeks before officially taking over as CEO in the third quarter, Jassy’s letter said.

He has big shoes to fill: Jassy oversaw AWS’s rapid growth for nearly two decades into a more than $ 50 billion company that contributes more than half of Amazon’s total income and forms the backbone for a large part of the internet.

While Jeff Bezos is stepping down, Amazon is putting its future in the cloud
The growth potential for AWS is still enormous, as more and more companies and government agencies move their data from on-premises servers to the cloud. But the cloud computing market has also gotten busier: Amazon now has to defend its excessive market share against increasingly strong competitors, especially Microsoft MSFT Azure.

“It’s easy to forget that AWS is still in the early stages of what’s possible,” said Jassy. “We have a lot more to come up with for clients, and we have a very strong leadership team and a group of builders to get it done. I’m excited about what lies ahead.”

Brian Klingbeil, chief strategy officer at hybrid IT provider and AWS partner Enoso, called Selipsky’s hiring “a smart move” by Amazon.

“It will be important to look at Selipsky’s strategic moves to match the pace of AWS with Azure, and even the upward momentum of Google Cloud,” said Klingbeil.

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