Amazon appoints former executive Adam Selipsky as AWS new director
Adam Selipsky
Selipsky worked with AWS for more than 10 years before leading the startup Tableau, which is now part of Salesforce.
Amazon has selected Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky as the replacement for Andy Jassy, the former head of AWS (Amazon Web Services) and the company's next CEO when founder Jeff Bezos resigns later this year. Selipsky worked with AWS for more than 10 years, rising to the rank of vice president of sales and marketing, before leading the startup Tableau, which is now part of Salesforce. Selipsky's hiring was first reported by CNBC, which released a memo that Jassy sent to Amazon employees on Wednesday announcing the news.
"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," Jassy wrote in the memo. Selipsky joined Salesforce when the cloud computing giant acquired Tableau in a monstrous $ 15.7 billion deal in 2019. Selipsky has been part of the Salesforce executive leadership team ever since as interim CEO of Tableau.
There was speculation about whether Amazon would promote an existing AWS executive to take on the role of Jassy. Eyes were on Matt Garman, who was promoted to the top sales position last year, and Peter DeSantis, general manager of AWS's EC2 business, as potential candidates.
Ultimately, it appears that Jassy turned to a former colleague and someone with quite an impressive track record who helped propel a mid-size software company toward a $ 15 billion acquisition as the best option for his replacement to run. AWS. Selipsky will rejoin Amazon in May when he and Jassy will "transition together" to their new roles in the run-up to Bezos' move to the board's CEO.
"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," Jassy wrote in the memo, referencing the less than 5 percent of global IT spend occurring in the cloud computing market. "We have a lot more to invent for customers, and we have a very strong leadership team and a group of builders to go make it happen."
