Amazon Web Services Inc. executive Charlie Bell has left the cloud giant to join rival Microsoft Corp., multiple publications reported this week. 

Bell’s departure was first reported on Wednesday morning by Business Insider. CNBC and The Information separately confirmed that the executive has joined Microsoft.

Bell (pictured) held the role of senior vice president at AWS. The executive was reportedly responsible for leading the “general management of AWS services, including product definition, pricing, P&Ls, software development, and service operations.”

Bell’s new role at Microsoft is reportedly corporate vice president. According to Business Insider, Microsoft and Amazon are currently negotiating a legal agreement to determine what responsibilities Bell can take on without breaching a noncompete contract with AWS.

Bell is joining Microsoft after 23 years at Amazon. The executive came aboard in the late 1990s when the online retail and cloud computing giant, then a startup, acquired an e-commerce software company he led at the time. 

“I was the CEO of a small startup,” Bell recalled in a 2018 interview with SiliconANGLE Media co-founder, Chief Executive and Executive Editor John Furrier. “We were building an e-commerce marketplace platform. And we actually had one of the guys working to get cache, just working with this small company across the lake that was a startup. And that was Amazon. We (the startup) ended up getting an offer to buy us. It was a small [acquihire]. So I came into Amazon through a teeny little acquisition.”

At Amazon, Bell initially worked on the company’s customer service applications and later took over its data center infrastructure operations. The executive laid the foundations of what would eventually become AWS. 

“We were building services,” Bell told Furrier. “And we reached a point where we were moving fast, but I was the bottleneck. So I was the infrastructure guy and everybody was trying to get servers out on me. We wanted our service teams to be able to write software that would call infrastructure and get servers back. And so we started with a clean sheet of paper.”

“That was the origin of AWS,” commented Furrier. “Bell was the guy, a total insider. It’s a huge defection.”

Bell, who was reportedly at one point seen as a candidate to become CEO of AWS, is one of several AWS executives who have departed in recent quarters to take on leadership positions at other major tech companies.

Mike Clayville, the cloud giant’s former vice president of worldwide commercial sales and business development, joined payments giant Stripe Inc. last August as chief revenue officer. In April of this year, Teresa Carlson became president and chief growth officer of Splunk Inc. after previously leading AWS’ government business as vice president for worldwide public sector and industries. Most recently, former AWS Marketplace general manager Kamlesh Talreja this month joined Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to lead engineering for its asset management division. 

Photo: SiliconANGLE