The head of cloud computing at the highly profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) will step down next month after a three-year term.
Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of Amazon’s CEO advisory team, will leave the company on June 3, Amazon said in a statement Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, senior vice president who oversaw sales and marketing at AWS.
Selipsky spent 14 years at AWS over two periods. He was the CEO of Tableau Software, a division of Salesforce, from 2016 until 2021, when he was appointed CEO of Amazon, where he was selected by Jassy to take over the division.
Under Mr. Selipsky’s leadership, AWS has grown rapidly, with revenue doubling to $90.8 billion in 2023 from $45.4 billion the year before he took over, and operating income nearly doubling during that period. The total amount was 24.6 billion dollars.
Still, AWS has been plagued by criticism that it wasn’t fast enough to deploy competitive generative artificial intelligence services to meet the challenges presented by competitors such as OpenAI. The company recently made its Amazon Q chatbot service widely available to businesses.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Selipsky would do next, but he said he was leaving the company to “spend more time with my family.”
AWS has the largest share of the U.S. cloud market, but is being squeezed by the dominance of Microsoft’s fast-growing Azure services, which benefit from its partnership with OpenAI for AI services. Alphabet Inc.’s Google is also expected to announce new AI services at its annual developer conference on Tuesday.
AWS, Amazon’s second-largest business unit after e-commerce, is widely seen as Amazon’s growth engine, contributing about 40% of the company’s revenue.
Garman joined Amazon as an intern in the summer of 2005 and joined the company full-time the following year as one of its first product managers.
Mr. Selipsky also led AWS through several rounds of layoffs, including hiring hundreds of people in April in the division that oversees brick-and-mortar technology sales and marketing. AWS was one of the hardest hit sectors in 2023, with Amazon cutting about 27,000 jobs.
Source: www.theguardian.com
