- The chief of Amazon Web Services, Adam Selipsy, will step down next month after a three-year term. The position will be taken over by Matt Garman, a senior vice president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS.
- Under Selipsky’s leadership, AWS saw rapid growth and is widely regarded as the company’s growth engine, contributing about 40% to its top line. Still, it has faced criticism that it has not been fast enough to roll out competitive generative AI services to meet the challenge of presented by competitors.
- AWS has already gone through several rounds of layoffs last year and this year and the reshuffle of the department head had a marginal impact on the share price.
Adam Selipsy, the chief of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing sector, will step down next month after a three-year term and the position will be taken over by Matt Garman, a senior vice president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS, the company said on Tuesday.
Adam, also a member of Amazon’s team advising CEO Andy Jassy, has spent 14 years at AWS over two stints and will leave the company on June 3. He said he would spend some time with his family after leaving the company.
The wildly profitable AWS
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.
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.
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While AWS has the largest share in the U.S. cloud market, and it recently made its Amazon Q chatbot service broadly available for businesses, Still, it has faced criticism that it has not been fast enough to roll out competitive generative AI services to meet the challenge of presented by competitors, including the fast-growing Azure service under the partnership of Microsoft and OpenAI.
AWS undergoing continuous position changes
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.
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The reshuffle of the department head had a marginal impact on the share price. “I don’t think it will be very disruptive at all,” said Jamie Meyers, senior analyst at Laffer Tengler Investments, which owns Amazon shares.
“The key player for AWS always has been Andy Jassy, who founded and led the unit until three years ago. So long as he is still at the helm of the company, AWS operations should continue according to plan,” he added.
