Adam Selipsky, CEO, Tableau Software
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Amazon chose Adam Selipsky, currently CEO of Tableau, maker of data visualization software owned by Salesforce, to manage its Amazon Web Services division. Andy Jassy, the current head of AWS and the person chosen to replace Jeff Bezos as head of the entire Amazon, informed employees in an email on Tuesday.
Selipsky is one of the people that several informants have identified as a possible successor to Jassy. Selipsky held a prominent position within AWS, as vice president of sales, marketing and support, before leaving to run Tableau then public in 2016. Salesforce purchased Tableau for $ 15.7 billion in 2019.
The position Selipsky left on Amazon has been vacant for years. Last year, AWS chose executive Matt Garman, who had worked on AWS ‘central virtual computing service EC2, to take over.
Selipsky was seen as a rising star at Salesforce after the acquisition of Tableau. At an event organized by Goldman Sachs in January, the bank’s CEO, David Solomon, asked Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to mention something that investors are not fully appreciating in his company. As part of his response, Benioff listed some key executives.
“We have many other CEOs in our midst, like Adam Selipsky, the CEO of Tableau,” said Benioff. “Soon, we will have Stewart, CEO of Slack,” he added, referring to Stewart Butterfield. Selipsky has remained President and CEO of Tableau since the acquisition. Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who will run Tableau.
Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins answered a question about Tableau integration in December. He said: “It is a unique and best-in-class asset in the world. Great leadership team, great CEO with Adam Selipsky and the management team.”
Selipsky joined Amazon in 2005, a year before the company launched EC2 and the S3 storage service, and stayed for 11 years. Prior to that, he had been vice president of RealNetworks.
A copy of the memo follows. Amazon later confirmed the change in a blog post.
I want to share that Adam Selipsky will be the next AWS CEO.
Adam is not a new face for AWS. In 2005, Adam was one of the first VPs that we hired at AWS and directed AWS sales, marketing and support for 11 years (as well as some other areas, such as our AWS platform services for a period). Adam then became the CEO of Tableau in 2016 and has directed Tableau for the past 4.5 years. Tableau had significant success during Adam’s time as CEO – the company’s value has quadrupled in just a few years, Tableau has transitioned through a fundamental change in the business model from perpetual licenses to subscription licensing and the company has ended being acquired by Salesforce in 2019 in one of the largest software acquisitions in history. After the acquisition, Adam remained CEO of Tableau and was a member of the Salesforce Executive Leadership Team.
Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having played a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well.
With a revenue execution rate of $ 51B that is growing 28% Y / Y (these were the last numbers for the fourth quarter of 2020 that we publicly share), it’s easy to forget that AWS is still in the early stages of what is possible. Less than 5% of global IT spending is in the cloud right now. This will change substantially in the years to come. We have a lot more to invent for customers and we have a leadership team and a group of very strong builders to make this happen. I’m excited about what’s to come.
Andy
PS Adam will return to AWS on May 17th. We will spend the subsequent weeks making the transition together before making the change sometime in the third quarter.
These are breaking news. Please check again for updates.
– CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.