Matt Garman will become the new CEO at AWS. He will replace Adam Selipsky, a tech veteran who came to the role when current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took over for Jeff Bezos.
Adam Selipsky is stepping down as AWS CEO effective June 3 and will be departing the company. He will be replaced by AWS veteran Matt Garman, currently senior vice president of sales and marketing at AWS.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy addressed the leadership change in a blog post Tuesday, touting Selipsky's successes and detailing Garman's 18-year history with the company.
The blog post included separate comments from Selipsky and Garman, with Garman saying customers and AWS employees should expect some "organizational adjustments" in the weeks ahead.
"We are a team of missionaries working passionately to help make our customers' lives and businesses better every day," Garman stated.
Executive leadership changes at AWS likely won't result in strategy shifts overnight, said Gary Chen, an analyst at IDC. Having a CEO with experience in project management as well as sales could help better define company strategy in the future.
"He's got experience some executives [might not] have by being on the ground and in the field," Chen said.
What will be more pressing for customers is if Garman's organizational adjustments result in layoffs, Chen said.
"Is this going to be a restructuring or a workforce reduction?" he said.
Future uncertain
Garman started at AWS in summer 2005 as an MBA intern before becoming one of the company's first product managers, according to the blog post.
Matt Garman
He has worked on multiple AWS products, including Amazon Elastic Block Store, a block storage service, and EC2 cloud compute services. In 2016, he became general manager of AWS Compute services before moving into an executive sales role.
Selipsky was hired in 2005 as one of the company's earliest vice presidents; he stepped away in 2016 to become CEO of Tableau. He returned to lead AWS in 2021, taking over for Jassy, with the knowledge that it was a temporary role, according to the blog post.
"We agreed that if he accepted the role, he'd likely do it for a few years, and that one of the things he'd focus on during that time was helping prepare the next generation of leadership," Jassy wrote.
Jassy praised Selipsky for taking over the company during the COVID-19 pandemic and directing the company to develop generative AI services such as Amazon Bedrock, a set of services for large language models, and Amazon Q, a GenAI copilot.
If Selipsky wanted to stay, he would have. If you're in charge of a $1 trillion company, you're king of the world.
Tracy WooAnalyst, Forrester Research
The explosiveness of GenAI might have contributed to Selipsky's departure, according to Tracy Woo, an analyst at Forrester Research. Amazon was late to GenAI compared with market-leader Microsoft and its heavy investment in OpenAI technology, she said.
More pressing for AWS, she added, was maintaining the growth from the pandemic, as well as holding off new market competitors for cloud and infrastructure technologies such as Nvidia.
"If Selipsky wanted to stay, he would have," Woo said. "If you're in charge of a $1 trillion company, you're king of the world. He came in at a poor moment for AWS -- it was never going to be this continued, frenzied hypergrowth."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
Matt Garman
