Adam Selipsky, head of Amazon's AWS cloud computing business, has reportedly informed his colleagues on Tuesday that he will be stepping down next month after three years in office. AWS Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Matt Garman will be his successor, Amazon confirmed.
In a memo to staff, said "...given the state of the business and the leadership team, now is an appropriate moment for me to make this transition." The man who was at the forefront of the comapny's sexpansion into Artificial Intelligence (AI) said he was leaving with "mixed emotions," Economic Times said in a report.
June 3, 2024, will be Adam Selipsky's last day in office, news agency Reuters said in a report. The 57-year-old Selipsky spent 14 years at AWS (Amazon Web Services) over two stints. He was the CEO of Tableau Software, a unit of Salesforce, from 2016 to 2021, when he was tapped to take over the division from Jassy who had been appointed Amazon CEO. It was in 2021 that Selipsky replaced then-AWS chief Andy Jassy.
Under Selipsky's leadership, AWS saw rapid growth, doubling sales of $45.4 billion from the year before his appointment to $90.8 billion in 2023 and nearly doubling operating income to $24.6 billion over that period. Still, AWS has faced criticism that it has not been fast enough to roll out competitive generative artificial intelligence services to meet the challenge presented by competitors, including OpenAI.
While AWS has the largest share in the U.S. cloud market, its dominance is under pressure from Microsoft's fast-growing Azure service that is benefiting from AI offerings powered by its tie-up with OpenAI. And Alphabet's Google is expected to roll out new AI services on Tuesday at its annual developer conference.
AWS, Amazon's second-biggest business unit after e-commerce, is widely regarded as the company's growth engine, contributing about 40% to its top line.
Who is Matt Garman?
Garman started at Amazon as an intern during the summer of 2005 and joined the company full-time the next year as one of its first product managers. Selipsky also led AWS through several rounds of layoffs, including a few hundred jobs in April in the unit overseeing sales and marketing for physical stores technology. AWS was among the hardest hit divisions in 2023 when Amazon trimmed around 27,000 jobs across the company.
Amazon Bedrock comes ri Asia Pacific
Meanwhile, AWS on Wednesday announced the general availability of its managed service Amazon Bedrock in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region.
The general availability of Bedrock in the region will support customers across the country, including public sector organisations and companies in regulated industries, to innovate and scale with generative AI applications, the Amazon subsidiary said.
"We want to provide organisations in India with the performant, cost-effective infrastructure they need to build with generative AI, the availability of Amazon Bedrock in India will further spur innovation that large enterprises, startups, independent software vendors, and public sector organisations are building in India, and complement their efforts to upskill their talent in generative AI," Shalini Kapoor, Chief Technologist, APJ Public Sector, Director AWS India and South Asia, said
