Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky is stepping down after three years leading the company, and will be replaced as the public cloud giant’s leader from 3 June 2024 by long-time Amazon staffer Matt Garman.
The upcoming change to the company’s executive leadership team was confirmed in a staff email, authored by Amazon.com and former AWS chief Andy Jassy. In it, he revealed Selipsky’s time as CEO was always intended to be relatively short-lived.
“Adam Selipsky was one of the first [vice-presidents] we hired in AWS back in 2005, and spent 11 years excellently leading AWS sales, marketing and support, before leaving to become the CEO of Tableau,” he said.
“I’ve always had a lot of respect for Adam, and we met several times to discuss the possibility of coming back to lead AWS,” said Jassy. “In those conversations, we agreed that if he accepted the role, he’d likely do it for a few years, and that one of the things he’d focus on during that time was helping prepare the next generation of leadership.”
Selipsky was announced as Jassy’s successor in March 2021, and when he joined AWS, the company was a verified $51bn revenue operation. When he departs next month, Jassy confirmed Selipsky will be stepping away at a time when AWS’s revenue has doubled to $100bn under his leadership.
“I’d like to thank Adam for everything he’s done to lead AWS Over the past three years,” said Jassy. “He took over in the middle of the pandemic, which presented a wide array of leadership and business challenges.
“Under his direction, the team made the right long-term decision to help customers become more efficient in their spend, even if it meant less short-term revenue for AWS.”
Much of Selipsky’s tenure has been defined by enterprises looking to optimise their AWS estates in the face of global economic uncertainty, which has – as reported by Computer Weekly – led to a slowdown in its annual revenue growth rate.
Although, the most recent set of AWS financial results have indicated a bounce-back in net-new cloud spend for the company, as well as a growing demand for its portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) services.
However, Tracy Woo, principal analyst at IT market watcher Forrester, said news of Selipsky’s departure is “unsurprising” given the slowdown in revenue growth the company experienced under his leadership, and the fact it seems to be playing catch-up with its rivals Microsoft and Google in the AI space.
“The generative AI movement caught AWS flat-footed, placing them at third in AI among the hyperscalers – unfamiliar territory for AWS,” said Woo. “Still, slow cloud growth isn’t necessarily a Selipsky issue but a cloud market [one].
“All of the major cloud providers have seen slowed growth in the past 18 months. A tech recession downturn and the frenzied ‘cloud-first’ mentality switch to a ‘cloud as necessary’ mindset slowed a lot of cloud spend from the hyper-growth we were used to seeing in the previous five years.”
Selipsky’s successor, Matt Garman, has been part of the Amazon fold since 2005, and became one of the first AWS product managers in 2006. From here he went on to become the general manager of the AWS Compute division in 2016 before moving on to lead the company’s worldwide sales, marketing, support and professional services division from 2020 onwards.
“Matt knows our customers and business as well as anybody in the world, and has senior leadership experience on both the product and demand generation sides,” said Jassy. “I’m excited to see Matt and his outstanding AWS leadership team continue to invent our future – it’s still such early days in AWS.”