Former Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky to lead AWS replacing Andy Jassy

As Andy Jassy is set to exit Amazon Web Services to lead Amazon as Group CEO, Adam Selipsky will lead AWS as the new CEO. The news became public on Tuesday when the e-commerce giant announced that they have brought back a former executive to run its cloud-computing unit. Selipsky will return to Amazon in May, and then become the head of Amazon Web Services later this year. “Adam is not a new face to AWS,” Jassy announced.

Adam Selipsky will replace Andy Jassy. The latter will become CEO of Amazon when founder Jeff Bezos steps down. Jeff will take up the role of executive chairman.

Amazon, on Tuesday, said that Adam Selipsky worked at AWS for 11 years. He left the company in 2016 to run software company Tableau. Salesforce later acquired Tableau in 2019. “Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team,” Jassy said in a blog. “And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.”

Talking about his work ethics at Tableau, Jassy underlined that 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. 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.”

The company has, thus, shown confidence in Adam's abilities.

About AWS

AWS powers the backend of many companies and accounts for more than 60% of Amazon's profits in FY 2020. The company stands as a top provider of cloud-computing services. It further counts startups, big corporations and many government agencies among its clients. Yet, it faces growing competition, especially from Microsoft. The latter has been aggressively seeking to sell big contracts to businesses and governments. For example, only last year, Amazon lost a multi-billion dollar contract with the US government to Microsoft. AWS is a key part of Amazon's growth strategy. Still, the cloud computing version has record profits for the world's largest online retailer.