The chief of Amazon.com’s wildly profitable Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit will step down next month after a three-year term.
Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of Amazon’s team advising CEO Andy Jassy, will leave the company on 3 June, according to an Amazon statement on Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, a senior vice president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS.
Selipsky has spent 14 years at AWS 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.
Under Selipsky’s leadership, AWS saw rapid growth, doubling sales of US$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 been plagued by criticism that it hasn’t been fast enough to roll out competitive generative artificial intelligence services to meet the challenge presented by competitors, including OpenAI. It recently made its Amazon Q chatbot service broadly available for businesses.
It wasn’t immediately clear what Selipsky may do next, though he said he was leaving the company to “spend more time with family”.
While it has the largest share in the US 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 Google is expected to roll out new AI services on Tuesday at its annual developer conference.
Growth engine
AWS, its second biggest business unit after e-commerce, is widely regarded as Amazon’s growth engine, contributing about 40% to the company’s top line.
Garman started at Amazon as an intern in 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. — Akash Sriram in Bengaluru, (c) 2024 Reuters
