Amazon.com Inc. has appointed former Tableau Software Inc. Chief Executive Officer Adam Selipsky to lead Amazon Web Services Inc., the online retail giant and cloud computing giant announced today. 

Selipsky, the first vice president at AWS, who spent 11 years there, will take over the role from current AWS CEO Andy Jassy, who is set to replace Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon in the third quarter. The leadership change at the cloud provider was first announced by Jassy in an internal memo to employees published by the company this morning.

Selipsky is joining AWS after five years at the helm of Tableau, one of the industry’s leading providers of business intelligence software. The executive took over the reins at Tableau while it was still publicly traded and led the company through its blockbuster $15.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce.com Inc. in 2019. During Selipsky’s tenure, Tableau experienced a significant increase in its share price and successfully shifted its revenue base from software licensing to recurring subscription contracts.

The incoming AWS CEO is no stranger to the cloud computing industry. Selipsky joined Tableau in 2016 from AWS, where he had overseen the cloud provider’s key customer-facing activities for years as vice president for sales, marketing and support. In that role, the executive was part of Amazon’s so-called S Team, the handful of senior leaders who report directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team,” Jassy said in the memo announcing Selipsky’s appointment. “And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.”

Selipsky is taking over a business that has grown considerably since his departure in 2016. AWS’ revenues have increased from $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2016 to $12.7 billion during the fourth quarter of 2020, the focus of its most recent earnings report.

Analysts lauded the move. “Selipsky is a good choice for a couple of reasons,” said Pund-IT analyst Charles King. “First, he has a solid understanding of the company, its technology and culture. In addition, Selipsky’s experience as CEO of Tableau should provide solid grounding for leading AWS. Finally, Selipsky did a terrific job in guiding Tableau through the process of its acquisition by Salesforce, offering him a deep understanding of one of the market’s most innovative cloud-powered enterprises.”

That last point, he added, might be the most important. “Since the richest market opportunities for public cloud providers are among enterprises, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are all working to become deeply focused on and proficient in addressing the needs of those customers,” he said. “Adam Selipsky’s past and recent leadership experiences make him an excellent choice to lead AWS during this transformation.”

Some AWS partners praised the new CEO as well. “It’s a smart move by Amazon for bringing in someone with past experience that can push its cloud business forward,” said Brian Klingbeil, chief strategy officer at Ensono LP, a hybrid information technology provider and premier AWS partner. “It will be important to watch Selipsky’s strategic moves to match AWS’ pace with Azure, and even Google Cloud’s upward momentum.”

Elissa Livingston, senior vice president of growth and strategy at CloudCheckr Inc., an Amazon Partners Network Advanced Technology Partner, said she expects Selipsky to consider new ways AWS can use data to offer customers insights so they can more effectively manage their cloud. “Third-party partner applications that support increasingly complex and diverse needs of IT organizations and service providers will be critical to supporting that vision,” she said.

All that said, he will face considerable challenges. “While he has had immense success in running Tableau and he will be super-hungry for a new challenge following his induction into Salesforce, running AWS is a different kettle of fish entirely,” said Nick McQuire, chief of research for enterprise at CCS Insight. “He will be tested early given the enormous change on the horizon in the cloud computing space. One of the big challenges Selipsky faces is how well he manages, along with Jassy, the inevitable bumps in the road facing Amazon with issues like antitrust, workers’ rights and employee activism on the rise.”

The scope of AWS’ product portfolio has expanded to a similarly large degree. AWS now offers access to on-demand quantum computers, ground stations for connecting to orbiting satellites and a growing selection of compute instances powered by its own internally designed processors. And those offerings represent only a small portion of the new solutions it has introduced since 2016.

Selipsky is set to rejoin AWS officially on May 17 and will take on the CEO role at the unit in the third quarter. “We will spend the subsequent several weeks transitioning together before making the change sometime in Q3,” Jassy wrote in the memo today.

Here’s the full memo from Jassy to his troops:

I want to share that Adam Selipsky will be the next CEO of AWS.

Adam is not a new face to AWS. Back in 2005, Adam was one of the first Vice President we hired in AWS, and ran AWS’s Sales, Marketing, and Support for 11 years (as well as some other areas like our AWS Platform services for a spell). Adam then became the CEO of Tableau in 2016, and ran Tableau for the last 4.5 years. Tableau experienced significant success during Adam’s time as CEO—the value of the company quadrupled in just a few years, Tableau transitioned through a fundamental business model change from perpetual licenses to subscription licensing, and the company was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2019 in one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Following the acquisition, Adam remained the CEO of Tableau and was a member of Salesforce’s Executive Leadership Team.

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.

With a $51B 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. 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. Am excited for what lies ahead.

Andy

P.S. Adam will return to AWS on May 17. We will spend the subsequent several weeks transitioning together before making the change sometime in Q3.

Photo: AWS