AWS has hired Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky to take over from Andy Jassy. Selipsky ran visual analytics specialist Tableau from 2016, through to its sale to Salesforce for 15.7 billion in 2019, staying on to run the company under Salesforce. He takes over from Jassy -- hired to run Amazon as Jeff Bezos stands down as CEO -- in Q3.
"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," Andy Jassy said in a letter to employees later shared publicly.
He added: "With a $51 billion 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.
Andy Jassy added: "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. [I] am excited for what lies ahead."
Selipsky will return to AWS May 17 to begin the handover.
The CEO, who has an MBA from Harvard, began his career at Mercer Management Consulting, a strategy consulting firm, later serving as Vice President of Marketing, Sales and Support for AWS -- staying with AWS for 11 years.
Amazon’s reported 2020 net profits of $21.3 billion last month, on staggering sales of $386.1 billion, up 38% year-on-year, using the earnings call to also announce Jeff Bezos's decision to step aside as CEO.
As Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder, Okta, noted at the time: “The news of Andy Jassy taking over as CEO of Amazon from Jeff Bezos is the latest in an emerging trend of cloud leaders stepping up as CEOs at some of the world’s largest companies. Appointments such as Satya Nadella at Microsoft, John Donahoe at Nike and Arvind Krishna at IBM confirm that we’re now officially in the era of the cloud CEO.
“There are two primary drivers for the shift towards the Cloud CEO. Firstly, cloud technologists bring perspective and expertise that’s become increasingly valuable to business success. This expertise helps companies build a recurring revenue model that is crucial in serving today’s digital-first customers. In a market where consumers not only want instant gratification, but also want to rent, not buy — being a SaaS expert is invaluable.
