Amazon former executive Adam Selipsky hired by the company to run AWS

Incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, on behalf of the company on Tuesday, announced that former executive Adam Selipsky has been hired to run the AWS.

Jassy who ran the Amazon cloud business for the past 15 years chose Selipsky, who is currently the CEO of Salesforce-owned data visualization software maker Tableau, to replace him in the Amazon Web Services division, according to an official email. Selipsky worked at AWS for more than a decade and rose to the rank of vice president of sales and marketing. He left Amazon to run the startup, Tableau.

“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team,” Jassy wrote in a memo. “And having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.”

When Jeff Bezos steps down as Amazon CEO in the third quarter of the year, Jassy will assume the office of the new CEO.

Before the announcement of Adam Selipsky as the new head of AWS, there were speculations over the possibility of Amazon promoting one of the current AWS executives to take on the role. The two potential candidates were Matt Garman, who was promoted to a top sales position last year, and Peter DeSantis, the general manager of AWS’s EC2 business.

Selipsky has been identified by several insiders as the only possible successor to Jassy. Before he left AWS, he had held a prominent position, and still maintains an excellent relationship with Jassy. Selipsky’s role as vice president for sales, marketing, and support was left vacant for years, until last year when Garman was promoted to take over the role.

Amazon is the market leader for public cloud services and infrastructure most companies use to run their applications, both internal and external. In 2019, an industry research company Gartner estimated that Amazon controlled 45% of the market, more than any other rival company, including Microsoft and Google.

Below is a copy of the memo, as retrieved by CNBC.

I want to share that Adam Selipsky will be the next CEO of AWS.

Adam is not a new face to AWS. Back in 2005, Adam was one of the first VPs we hired in AWS, and ran AWS’s Sales, Marketing, and Support for 11 years (as well as some other areas like our AWS Platform services for a spell). Adam then became the CEO of Tableau in 2016, and ran Tableau for the last 4.5 years. Tableau experienced significant success during Adam’s time as CEO-- the value of the company quadrupled in just a few years, Tableau transitioned through a fundamental business model change from perpetual licenses to subscription licensing, and the company was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2019 in one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Following the acquisition, Adam remained the CEO of Tableau and was a member of Salesforce’s Executive Leadership Team.

Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.

With a $51B revenue run rate that’s growing 28% YoY (these were the Q4 2020 numbers we last publicly shared), it’s easy to forget that AWS is still in the very early stages of what’s possible. Less than 5% of the global IT spend is in the cloud at this point. That’s going to substantially change in the coming years. We have a lot more to invent for customers, and we have a very strong leadership team and group of builders to go make it happen. Am excited for what lies ahead.

Andy

P.S. Adam will return to AWS on May 17. We will spend the subsequent several weeks transitioning together before making the change sometime in Q3.