Salesforce
- Amazon named Adam Selipsky, the current CEO of Tableau Software, as its incoming cloud CEO.
- Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO later this year.
- Selipsky previously spent 11 years at Amazon and returns on May 17; he'll officially take over AWS in Q3.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Amazon named Adam Selipsky, a former executive and the CEO of Tableau Software, as the incoming head of its cloud business.
The current Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as Amazon CEO later this year. Selipsky left Amazon in 2016 after 11 years to become CEO of Tableau, now owned by Salesforce.
Jassy announced Selipsky's hiring in an email to employees on Tuesday. Selipsky will return to Amazon on May 17 and begin the transition before Jassy official takes over as Amazon CEO in the third quarter of the year.
AWS generates over $40 billion in annual revenue, and the de facto leader in cloud computing, with over 30% of market share.
Selipsky had long been rumored as a possible candidate to replace Jassy as AWS CEO. "He and Andy [Jassy] are tight," one AWS insider told Insider last month.
In naming Selipsky, Amazon passed over several internal candidates including infrastructure boss Peter DeSantis, sales and marketing chief Matt Garman, and head of utility computing services Charlie Bell.
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Read Andy Jassy's email to employees announcing the change:
"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 VPs 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."