Meet Datanami 2022 Person to Watch Adam Selipsky

When former Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy left to take the top job at the parent company, it opened up a spot for Adam Selipsky to take over the world’s biggest cloud platform.

The timing was fortuitious for Selipsky, who previously served as vice president of marketing, sales, and support for AWS for 11 years from 2005-2016. During that time, Selipsky helped launch and grow AWS from a start-up into a multi-billion dollar business and establish it as the undisputed market leader in cloud computing.

Today, AWS is a $60-billion industry juggernaut, by far the biggest public cloud platform. The company has a 33% share of the public cloud market, according to Synergy Research Group, compared to 21% and 10% for its two closest competitors, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The company today offers more than 200 services, ranging from EC2 cloud compute instances and its ubiquitous S3 storage environment to specialized data analysis (Red Shift, Athena) and machine learning (SageMaker) services.  Where will AWS go under Selipsky? The company offered a glimpse into its future at the 2021 re:Invent conference, where it unveiled a host of new services.

In his re:Invent keynote, Selipsky noted that only 5% to 15% of global IT spending is spent currently in the cloud. That means the total addressable market (TAM) for AMZN is still a potentially lucrative mountain to climb.

“But despite what feels like massive adoption, we’re actually just getting started,” Selipsky said. “There are so many workloads that are going to move in the coming years. Such innovation is yet to come, and it’s such an opportunity for all of us together.”

Immediately prior to rejoining AWS in 2021, Adam was the president and CEO of Tableau Software. He led Tableau through its acquisition by Salesforce, in what was the third largest software industry acquisition at the time. Before AWS he was an executive at RealNetworks, leading the video subscription and media player division. And before that, he was a Principal at Mercer Management Consulting, a strategy consulting firm. Adam holds an A.B. in government and an MBA from Harvard University.

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