Andy Jassy, executive director of web services at Amazon.com Inc., speaks at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in San Francisco, California, USA, on Wednesday, April 19, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
When Amazon announced that Andy Jassy, head of Amazon’s cloud unit, would replace founder Jeff Bezos as CEO later this year, the company omitted one minor detail: the name of the person who will run Amazon’s cloud. The omission sparked speculation in tweets, text messages and Reddit comments.
A name continued to appear: Matt Garman, an engineer who spent years running Amazon Web Services’ core EC2 virtual computing service and was there when it was announced in 2006.
Garman is not very well known by the hordes that visit Las Vegas every year to attend AWS Reinvent conferences. Garman is no ordinary on the Reinvent scene, unlike the polished head of technology in the Netherlands, Jassy and Amazon, who wears Amazon T-shirts, Werner Vogels. But Garman is well-respected inside Amazon – similar to the way Satya Nadella was viewed internally while taking over the helm from Steve Ballmer in 2014.
Just as Jassy’s touch to be Bezos’ successor signals that Amazon is firmly a technology company and not just a retailer, Garman’s choice would show that AWS, which has become an information technology provider for large companies like Coca-Cola and GE, not ‘I don’t want to lose relevance to programmers.
Garman would be the most logical choice to replace Jassy, said Matt McIlwain, CEO of Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. “I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly,” McIlwain said.
AWS declined to comment, and Garman did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s only been a year since Amazon moved Garman from vice president of computing services to vice president of sales and marketing for AWS – in fact, the chief operating officer of AWS. He also joined the Amazon circle of top executives, known as Team S. Although Garman did not have his new job for a long time, he reshaped his organization, McIlwain said.
“It’s very difficult to be successful in terms of the house product and the selling part of the product,” McIlwain said.
AWS increasingly put him in front of the press to discuss announcements, such as a deal with Slack’s communications software maker.
Garman’s experience sets him apart, but there are other people Amazon could reach to run cloud services instead:
- Peter DeSantis. For the past four years, DeSantis, another member of Team S, has given a prominent evening speech to show infrastructure developments, such as Arm-based server chips. Like Garman, DeSantis witnessed the birth of AWS on Amazon.
- Charlie Bell. Bell is a low-profile executive in charge of utility computing at AWS and has been with Amazon for 23 years.
Amazon could also hire someone outside the company to run AWS, but Amazon maintains unconventional practices and values that could make it harder for a director at another company to quickly adapt to such a large role.
One option is to bring back Adam Selipsky, who once held the role that Garman has today. Selipsky left AWS in 2016 to run data visualization software maker Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019 for $ 14.8 billion.
One thing is clear: Amazon will not make Jassy run the cloud business with the rest of Amazon.
Amazon now has nearly 1.3 million employees, with no contractors and temporary workers, and the company operates in markets beyond the cloud and commerce, including advertising and devices. Leadership in all these areas was not exactly what Jeff Bezos did.
“We will work to complete the role of AWS and talk about it in the future,” Brian Olsavsky, chief financial officer of Amazon, told analysts in a conference call on Tuesday.
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CLOCK: “It’s not a shock” to see Andy Jassy become CEO of Amazon: Brent Thill