Andy Jassy, CEO of web services at Amazon.com Inc., speaks at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in San Francisco, California, USA, on April 19, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
When Amazon announced that Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon’s cloud unit, will replace founder Jeff Bezos as CEO later this year, the company omitted one small detail: the name of the person who will run Amazon’s cloud. The default caused speculation in tweets, text messages, and Reddit comments.
A name kept popping up: Matt Garman, an engineer who ran the core of Amazon Web Services’ EC2 virtual computing service for years and was there when it was announced in 2006.
Garman is not well known to the hordes that visit Las Vegas every year to attend the AWS Reinvent conferences. Garman is not a regular on the Reinvent stage, unlike polished Jassy and Amazon’s T-shirt-wearing chief technology officer from the Netherlands, Werner Vogels. But Garman is highly respected within Amazon – similar to the way Satya Nadella was viewed internally when he took the helm of Microsoft from Steve Ballmer in 2014.
Just as the tapping of Jassy as Bezos’s successor indicates Amazon is basically a technology company and not just a retailer, the choice of Garman would show that AWS, which has become an information technology provider for big companies like Coca-Cola and GE, does not. I want to lose its relevance to programmers.
Garman would be the most logical choice to replace Jassy, said Matt McIlwain, general manager at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. “I didn’t expect it to happen so soon,” said McIlwain.
AWS declined to comment, and Garman did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s only been a year since Amazon moved Garman from vice president of computer services to vice president for AWS sales and marketing functions – basically AWS’s chief operating officer. He also joined Amazon’s circle of top executives known as the S team. While Garman hasn’t had the new job for a long time, he’s reshaped his organization, McIlwain said.
“It’s very difficult to be successful on the product side of the house and the sell-the-product side of the house,” said McIlwain.
AWS has also increasingly put him in front of the press to discuss announcements, such as a deal with team communications software maker Slack.
Garman’s experience sets him apart, but there are others Amazon could use to run cloud services instead:
- Peter DeSantis. DeSantis, another member of the S team, has held a prominent evening lecture for the past four years to show off infrastructure advancements such as Arm-based server chips. Like Garman, DeSantis witnessed the birth of AWS at Amazon.
- Charlie Bell. Bell is a low-profile manager responsible for utility computing services at AWS, and he has been with Amazon for 23 years. Bell is also part of the S team.
Amazon could also hire someone outside the company to run AWS, but Amazon has unconventional practices and values that can make it more difficult for an executive at another company to quickly adapt to such a large role.
One option is to bring back Adam Selipsky, who once played the role Garman now has. Selipsky left AWS in 2016 to run data visualization software maker Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019 for $ 14.8 billion.
One thing is clear: Amazon will not let Jassy run the cloud business with the rest of Amazon.
Amazon now has nearly 1.3 million employees, excluding contractors and contingent workers, and the company operates in markets beyond the cloud and commerce, including advertising and devices. Leading all those areas wasn’t even something Jeff Bezos did.
“We will work on filling out the AWS role, and we’ll talk about that in the future,” Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call Tuesday.
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