Amazon Names Matt Garman to Lead Cloud Computing Unit

Amazon’s all-important cloud computing division has a new leader.

Adam Selipsky, who has headed Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2021, is stepping down from that position in June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a message to staff Tuesday (May 14). Taking his place will be Matt Garman, head of the division’s sales and marketing operations.

Jassy said that when he approached Selpiski to lead the division, it was with the understanding that it would be only for a few years.

“He took over in the middle of the pandemic, which presented a wide array of leadership and business challenges,” Jassy wrote. “Under his direction, the team made the right long-term decision to help customers become more efficient in their spend, even if it meant less short-term revenue for AWS.”

He added that Selpiski’s leadership has helped usher in “several impactful Generative AI services,” like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, with AWS having reached a $100 billion annual revenue run rate during its most recent quarter.

In PYMNTS’ coverage of the company’s last earnings report, we noted that AWS showed signs of a comeback as it faced rising competition from rivals like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with the division’s sales climbing 17% year-over-year to $25 billion. Operating income increased to $9.4 billion, compared to $5.1 billion in the first quarter of 2023.

Jassy attributed the rebound to companies renewing their infrastructure modernization efforts and the increasing appeal of AWS’ AI capabilities.

“The company also announced plans to launch new AWS infrastructure regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Mexico and a $10 billion investment to build two data center complexes in Mississippi, further expanding its global footprint,” PYMNTS wrote.

And in his yearly letter to shareholders last month, Jassy stressed the company’s commitment to improving the process for developers via the provision of foundational building blocks, known as primitives, through AWS.

The CEO said the introduction of primitives has improved the speed and agility with which developers can create and deploy applications, citing examples such as Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) as services that have simplified the way developers build and scale applications.

By allowing developers to craft applications more efficiently, Amazon can fuel customer engagement and loyalty across its platform, both the B2B and B2C sides, he said.

“Being intentional about building primitives requires patience,” Jassy said. “Releasing the first couple primitive services can sometimes feel random to customers (or the public at large) before we’ve unveiled how these building blocks come together.”