Amazon.com Inc.’s newly appointed chief cloud officer, Matt Garman, inherits a business worth $100 billion a year and its most profitable ever. He also faces the difficult task of maintaining his cloud computing pioneer advantage in the age of artificial intelligence.
Garman, 48, a longtime technical leader at Amazon Web Services who most recently served as chief sales officer, will take on one of the most prominent positions in the tech industry when he succeeds Adam Selipsky in next month.
Selipsky, who has led AWS since 2021, will step down from the role on June 3 “to move on to the next challenge,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in an email to employees Tuesday .
The cloud unit, the world’s largest seller of computing power and data storage for rent, has long accounted for the bulk of Amazon’s operating income, serving as a cash machine for its parent company. Flexibility to invest heavily in other areas.
But AWS has struggled over the past two years as businesses cut spending on their technology following pandemic-era booms. Cloud growth slowed to a record low last year, which executives attributed in part to Amazon’s own efforts to help customers save money. The unit staged its largest-ever round of layoffs a year ago and has continued to make cuts since then, even as it continues to hire for specific areas.
The division also faces a race to commercialize a new generation of artificial intelligence services, falling behind rivals Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. in bringing to market the systems that support products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Some customers believe that the first version of AWS’s AI products are not enough. Since then, the company has invested $4 billion in Anthropic, a company that builds highly regarded general AI tools. AWS is also building its own tools to compete with ChatGPT and has partnered with other companies to provide AI services using its servers.
So while Microsoft and Google are considered by many to be leaders in creative AI – responding to user prompts with text, voice or newly created images – Amazon is expected to pick up the slack. about tens of billions of dollars in AI-related business for years to come.
“Regardless of whether Adam Selipsky is more or less responsible for AWS’s growth in AI,” said Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill Group, a consulting firm that advises AWS customers, , as CEO, he owns the results.” “And the results were not great.”
Selipsky, 57, said in a memo to employees that he would “take the opportunity to spend a little more time with my family for a while, recharge a little and create some free space.” mentally free to reflect and consider possibilities. An AWS spokesperson declined to comment beyond the executives’ memo.
Selipsky was Jassy’s right-hand man during the cloud group’s early years, holding a CEO-like position where he led sales, marketing and other roles. He left in 2016 to run Tableau, a Seattle company that builds data visualization tools, which was later sold to Salesforce Inc., before returning three years ago. His second stint at Amazon was a surprise to many AWS employees who expected the job to go to Garman.
Garman interned at Amazon in 2005 while still studying business at Northwestern University and joined full-time the following year, helping launch some of the first AWS products. He continues to run engineering teams working on Amazon’s on-demand computing power services and began leading AWS’s sales and marketing team in 2020, a sign for those watching closely. company star that he is being groomed for the top job.
Practice humility
People who have worked with Garman describe him as a detail-oriented engineering manager in the Amazon mold, brimming with confidence and humility when working with customers or entering new markets. Like many senior Amazon executives, he is not considered a public speaker or a cheerful person. Garman doesn’t shy away from confrontation, challenging the product team’s assumptions in meetings and diving into specific data points.
“Matt has a unique set of skills and experience,” said Jassy, who led AWS from its founding in the early 2000s until his appointment to Amazon’s top leadership position in 2021. unusually strong for his new role. He is very customer focused, great product.” leader, creative, intelligent problem solver, right a lot, with high standards and a penchant for meaningful action.”
Garman said he will announce organizational changes in the coming weeks. One came Tuesday: Amazon’s sustainability team, which reported to Selipsky, will move to communications chief Drew Herdener’s organization.
Shortly after starting work at AWS, Garman was asked by a business school friend who worked at another Amazon unit how things were going at AWS, which at the time was a an online retailer’s counterintuitive bet. Garman replied that he thinks AWS will one day become a $1 billion business. His friends scoffed, Garman told Bloomberg in 2019.
By the time AWS disclosed its revenue nearly a decade after that conversation, it had achieved annual revenue of nearly $8 billion.
“We thought it would take longer,” Garman said.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.
