Adam Selipsky, CEO of Tableau Software
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Amazon has chosen Adam Selipsky, currently CEO of Salesforce-owned data visualization software maker Tableau, to lead 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 on Tuesday in an email.
Selipsky is one of several people who had been identified as a possible successor to Jassy. Selipsky had held a prominent position within AWS, as vice president of sales, marketing and support, before leaving to run Tableau then public in 2016. Salesforce bought Tableau for $ 15.7 billion in 2019.
The role Selipsky left on Amazon was vacant for years. Last year, AWS chose executive Matt Garman, who had worked at AWS ’basic EC2 virtual computing service, to take over.
Selipsky was seen as a rising star within Salesforce after the acquisition of Tableau. At an event hosted by Goldman Sachs in January, the bank’s CEO, David Solomon, asked Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to name something that investors are not entirely grateful about his company. As part of his response, Benioff listed a number of senior executives.
“We have as many other CEOs as Adam Selipsky, the CEO of Tableau,” Benioff said. “We will soon have Stewart, Slack’s CEO,” he added referring to Stewart Butterfield. Selipsky has been president and CEO of Tableau since the acquisition. Salesforce did not immediately respond to a request for comment on who will run Tableau.
Salesforce Chief Financial Officer Mark Hawkins answered a question about Tableau’s integration in December. He said: “It’s the best single asset in the world. Great leadership team, great general manager with Adam Selipsky and the management team.”
Selipsky joined Amazon in 2005, a year before the company introduced the EC2 and S3 storage service, and stayed for 11 years. He had previously been vice president of RealNetworks.
Follow a copy of the note. Amazon later confirmed the move in a blog post.
I want to share that Adam Selipsky will be the next CEO of AWS.
Adam is not a new face of AWS. In 2005, Adam was one of the first vice presidents we hired at AWS and led sales, marketing and support for AWS for 11 years (as well as some other areas such as our AWS platform services for a spell). ). Adam then became Tableau’s CEO in 2016 and has led Tableau for the past 4.5 years. Tableau experienced significant success during Adam’s time as CEO: the company’s value quadrupled in a few years, Tableau made a fundamental business model change from perpetual licenses to subscription licenses , and finally the company was acquired by Salesforce in 2019 in one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Following the acquisition, Adam continued to be Tableau’s CEO and was part of Salesforce’s 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, for 11 years in such a high role at AWS, he knows our culture and business well.
With a $ 51 million revenue execution rate growing 28% year-over-year (these were the fourth quarter 2020 numbers we shared publicly for the last time), it’s easy to forget that AWS is still in the top stages of what is possible. Less than 5% of global IT spending is in the cloud right now. This will change substantially in the coming years. We have a lot more to invent for customers and we have a very strong leadership team and a group of builders to achieve that. I am excited about what awaits us.
Andy
PS Adam will return to AWS on May 17th. We will spend the next few weeks making a transition together before making the change at some point in the third quarter.
This is breaking news. Please check for updates again.
– CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.