Amazon.com Inc. has named Matt Garman the new chief executive officer of its Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud division.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the leadership change in a memo to employees made public this morning. Garman, a longtime AWS executive who was the first product manager of the Amazon EC2 instance line earlier in his career, currently heads the cloud giant’s sales, marketing, support and professional services groups. He is taking over the reins from Adam Selipsky, another AWS veteran who stepped into the CEO role in 2021.

“Matt is an extremely strong product leader, so in this pressing AI race, he’ll be a good choice,” said SiliconANGLE Media CEO John Furrier, who had an extensive interview with Garman last year. “He’s trusted by Andy and was a core product manager who worked on the crown jewel, EC2. Now I expect Matt to turn up AWS’ AI game big time.”

Garman joined AWS as an MBA intern in 2005, the same year Selipsky came aboard to become one of the cloud giant’s first vice presidents. After creating the Amazon unit’s first service-level agreements, Garman took responsibility for its then-nascent EC2 portfolio of cloud instances. He later led the team that built the Amazon EBS block storage service, another core pillar of AWS’ product portfolio.

Garman spent a total of 11 years in various product leadership roles at the cloud giant. In 2020, then-Amazon CEO Jassy named him senior vice president of sales, marketing, support and professional services. “Matt knows our customers and business as well as anybody in the world, and has senior leadership experience on both the product and demand generation sides,” Jassy noted in the internal memo announcing the leadership changes. 

AWS’ marketing, sales and support groups were previously led by Selipsky. The executive left the cloud provider in 2016 for a four-year stint at the helm of Tableau before rejoining as CEO. He took over the latter role from Jassy, who gave up the reins at AWS in 2021 to become CEO of parent company Amazon. 

“Having been on the inside at AWS, it is less surprising to me that Adam is moving on,” said Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research. “Andy Jassy and his S-team prior to Adam’s arrival were a well-oiled machine that could ‘deep dive’ into any area of the AWS product or operations stack, as I saw firsthand. When Adam came in, and there were a lot of departures, Charlie Bell being the linchpin, a lot of that institutional knowledge left with those folks.

“Adam did some reorganization that needed to be done inside of AWS but ultimately didn’t build a team that could recreate the Andy S-team magic and continue the culture,” Strechay added. “He was strong on the operations side, but not as much on the innovation and product side of the ledger.”

Time for a change

Gartner Inc. vice president Sid Nag said AWS has been due for a shakeup since Microsoft Corp. seized the generative artificial intelligence leadership position with its investment in OpenAI LLC. “AWS was caught flat-footed in many ways in AI compared to Microsoft and Google,” he said. “There are several areas where they have not been leading the charge.”

Nag said Garman’s choice may help restore some of the energy that AWS lost under the low-key Selipsky. “Personality-wise, Garman is more energetic than Adam,” he said.

David Linthicum, a research analyst with theCUBE Research and author of  “An Insider’s Guide to Cloud Computing,” said the major hyperscalers have lapsed into a reactive posture. “Right now, all the cloud providers seem to be fast followers and not innovators,” he said. “They pretty much look and function the same.”

Generative AI is a chance to lead again, but “public clouds are no longer a slam-dunk choice for AI,” he said. “Unless the public cloud providers come up with more compelling reasons, they may find that AI workloads end up within enterprises’ data centers, co-location providers, and managed services providers.”

Gartner Analyst Craig Lowery agreed that AWS appears to be losing its innovation edge. He noted that AWS, Microsoft and Google are grouped closely together in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services. “In prior years, there was a considerable distance between AWS and the others,” Lowery said.

Big shoes to fill

Other industry observers said Selipsky’s stint as CEO needs to be viewed in the context of his predecessor’s achievements. “It’s hard to fill big shoes like Andy Jassy,” technology analyst and go-to-market strategist Sarbjeet Johal told SiliconANGLE. “It seems like Adam struggled to create a following, internally and externally, from the get-go. Also, his coming back to AWS caused some rift inside AWS leadership. The timing is odd: He should have left very early, or he should have stayed a bit longer. 

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller agreed. “Selipsky, despite having been at AWS before, never felt at ease or on top of things in the way Jassy was,” he said. “With Matt Garman, there is now a leader that is in-depth in the weeds and the know-how to face massive like a fast-growing Azure, Oracle Cloud in the enterprise and a Google Cloud that is leading on the gen AI side.”

Charles King, chief analyst at Pund-IT Inc., expects to see Selipsky surface again soon. “I doubt he will be on the shelf for long, though [non-disclosure agreements] and non-competes are likely to impact his next role,” he said. 

Transformational leadership

It remains to be seen what the leadership change means for AWS. King believes that Garman’s appointment as CEO may not lead to major changes at the cloud giant, which saw its annualized revenue run rate surpass $100 billion this year. “He’s fully capable and deeply experienced,” the analyst told SiliconANGLE. “However, he’s not the kind of ‘transformational’ exec you’d bring in to shake things up.”

Others, such as Furrier and Corey Quinn, chief cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, argue Garman’s appointment to the CEO post may bring a new jolt of energy to AWS. “Managing AWS at its current $100 billion-plus run rate is a colossal task, and at such scales, many corporate cultures struggle to maintain their integrity,” Quinn wrote in the latest edition of his Last Week in AWS newsletter. “Yet, with Garman at the helm, there’s a genuine chance for a return to the foundational values that made AWS the leader it’s become.”

Garman spoke with Furrier at last year’s Supercloud 3 event from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

With reporting from Paul Gillin and Robert Hof

Image: AWS