redsnapperfish| Amazon appoints new head of cloud computing business to welcome AI commercialization competition with Microsoft

Matt Garman, Amazon's newly appointed head of cloud computing, will take over a business with an annual turnover of $100 billion, which is also at an all-time high in profitability. He also faces the daunting task of maintaining the leading position of the cloud computing pioneer in the era of artificial intelligence.

Gaman, 48, has long been the engineering team leader of Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) and later becameRedsnapperfishSales director. He will succeed Adam Adam Selipsky next month at the helm of one of the most important jobs in the technology industry.

Andy Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, said in an email to employees on May 14 that Mr Seripsky, who has led AWS since 2021, would "move on to the next challenge" on June 3.

As the world's largest leased computing and data storage service, Amazon's cloud computing business has long been the company's main source of revenue, and the cash cow provides the parent company with room to invest heavily in other areas.

But over the past two years, AWS has run into difficulties as companies cut back on spending after companies invested heavily in technology during the epidemic. Last year, cloud computing growth slowed to an all-time low, which executives attributed in part to Amazon's own efforts to help customers save money. The department made its biggest-ever layoffs a year ago and continues to cut staff to increase efficiency, while it continues to hire in some areas.

Faced with a race to commercialize a new generation of artificial intelligence services, the unit got off to a bad start in bringing systems such as ChatGPT, which supports OpenAI, to market, lagging behind rivals Microsoft and Google, owned by Alphabet Inc.

Some customers think that the early versions of AWS artificial intelligence products are not good enough. The company then invested $4 billion in Anthropic, a highly respected developer of generative AI tools. AWS is also building its own tools to compete with ChatGPT and working with other companies to use its servers to support AI services.

So while Microsoft and Google are widely seen as leaders in generative AI, which generates text, voice, or images through user commands, Amazon is also expected to make a lot of money in AI-related businesses in the coming years.

"No matter how much Adam Seripsky is responsible for AWS's AI progress, as chief executive, he is responsible for the results," said Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill Group, a consulting firm that advises AWS clients. "and the results are not ideal."

Seripsky, 57, said in a letter to employees that he would "take the opportunity to spend more time with his family, recharge and create some space for mental emptiness to reflect on and consider possibilities". A spokesman for AWS declined to comment on anything other than executive memos.

At the beginning of AWS, Seripsky was Jassi's right-hand man, holding similar positions as chief operating officer, leading sales, marketing and other work. He left Amazon in 2016 to run Tableau, a Seattle-based data visualization company that was later sold to Salesforce Inc. Mr Seripsky returned to Amazon three years ago, and his return surprised many AWS employees, who had expected Mr Gaman to take over.

Gaman joined Amazon as an intern at Northwestern University Business School in 2005 and joined full-time the following year to launch some of the earliest AWS products. He then ran Amazon's on-demand computing services engineering team and led AWS's sales and marketing team in 2020, a prelude to his future promotion to the top job for Amazon watchers.

People who have worked with him describe him as a detail-oriented engineering manager in Amazon standards, confident and modest when dealing with customers or entering new markets. Like many Amazon executives, he is not considered a well-rounded orator or a good man. Instead of avoiding confrontation, Gaman will challenge the product team's vision at the meeting and delve deeper into specific data points.

"Matt has a lot of extraordinary skills and experience for his new position," said Jassi, who was the leader of AWS from the beginning of the 21st century until he became the head of Amazon in 2021. "he is always customer-centric, a great product leader, creative, resourceful, and makes a lot of the right decisions, he follows high standards and is good at action."

Gaman says he will announce some organizational changes in the coming weeks. One of them was announced on May 14th: Amazon's sustainability team, which previously reported to Seripsky, will be merged into the organization of Drew Hedenner, the head of public relations.

Garman told Bloomberg in 2019 that shortly after joining AWS, a business school classmate who worked in other parts of Amazon asked him about AWS, when an online retailer's foray into cloud computing was not a logical bet. Gaman replied that he thought AWS's future business would be worth more than $1 billion. His friends scoffed at it.

Nearly a decade after that conversation, by the time AWS publicly disclosed, its annual sales were expected to reach nearly $8 billion.

"We didn't expect it to be so soon," Gaman said.