This is that magical time of the year. No, I am not talking about the upcoming vacation. Instead, it's time for re:Invent, the AWS annual customer event that starts next week. The conference is always a news event, announcing a large number of new features and products. This is also when AWS convenes the media, customers, partners, and other interested parties to meet in Vegas. This year it has a new turning point.
In addition to the party returning to Las Vegas as a virtual event a year later due to the pandemic, this year's event will mark the first time that re:Invent will be at the helm of the new CEO Adam Selipsky.
Earlier this year, after Jeff Bezos announced that he would serve as executive chairman, Selipsky resigned from Tableau, and former AWS CEO Andy Jassi succeeded Bezos as CEO of Amazon.
With the reshuffle of the executive music chair, Selipsky will deliver the main keynote speech, and he will have a pair of big shoes to fill. Jassy has an incredible ability to keep the company's vast product catalog in his head and talk about how all products seem to be improvised. It is not easy to accomplish similar feats.
But as Jassy pointed out in an email to employees announcing that the former Tableau executive will become his successor, Selipsky brings his personal advantage to the table:
"Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to the already very strong AWS leadership team. Moreover, he has held senior positions at AWS for 11 years and understands our culture very well. And business."
All of this is true. The department he currently operates is still firmly in control of the market, but there are signs that, despite the success, Selipsky may be ready to brand his own on AWS and may begin to adjust the way they do business. .
For example, Bloomberg reported last week that he intends to learn from the cloud computing manuals of Microsoft and Google and focus more on industry-specific solutions. Under Jassy's rule, they avoided this strategy, preferring to adopt a more general approach, letting partners deal with specific details.
Perhaps his brief time as part of Salesforce when Tableau was acquired, and liked the industry-driven solution approach, convinced Selipsky that this is also a good way for AWS. But other than that, he did not disclose whether he intends to change things under his command. Maybe he will be next week, or he sees something that is not broken and does not need repair.
When asked what advice they would give Celipski, several industry observers responded quickly.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, said that the first thing he suggested to Selipski to do was to reduce the growing product portfolio to a simpler, less comprehensive catalog. "The CTO avoids [the solution] from relying on the ingenuity of the developers instead of a platform product that provides a version number and roadmap from AWS to connect them," he said.
Patrick Moorhead, the founder and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, put forward some different suggestions, suggesting that they move up the stack and start developing more SaaS applications to compete with companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Adobee. In addition, he hopes to see them turn to hybrids more, while their competitors are trying to lead.
In summary, the department is very successful. In the most recent quarterly report, the company reported $16.1 billion in revenue, but Selipsky himself told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang last week that he knew he could not simply be satisfied with his own Achievement, and hope to continue to succeed with such a strong competitor chasing him. company.
"It's really important to continue to act as if we are insurgents instead of starting to act like incumbents," Celipsky told Chang.
In any case, at the re:Invent conference, he will be the spokesperson of AWS for the first time, giving a main keynote speech. When reporting to Jassy, he is his own person and will emphasize that he thinks it is very important for the continued development of a lucrative company. Assign important things. We will see next week if this involves any major changes.