Who is Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos’ successor?
The decision to name Andy Jassy as the new Amazon CEO completes the shift from a retailer to a tech company in the key areas, including cloud and artificial intelligence
Jeff Bezos has announced he will be stepping down as the company’s CEO. His designated successor is Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon Web Services.
Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, just about three years after Bezos launched the company in his garage and three weeks before the company went public.
He first worked in a marketing role, and then was placed on a “SWAT team” project exploring other potential product categories for Amazon beyond books, reports CBS. In 2000s he became Bezos’ first “shadow” adviser, something like a corporate chief of staff who followed the CEO every day and sat in on all of his meetings.
Since 2003 Andy Jassy has led Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing division. He has turned cloud computing into the most profitable of Amazon’s divisions, accounting for roughly 63 percent of the company’s profits in 2020 and putting it on track to make more than $50 billion in revenue this year. Amazon now controls about a third of the entire cloud infrastructure market, more than its next closest competitors (Microsoft and Google) combined, writes Theverge.
Jassy will have to prove himself capable of running more than just AWS, which is a critical part of Amazon but nowhere close to the scope of the full company. Marketwatch quotes Daniel Newman, principal analyst at Futurum Research:
“They are digital commerce, they are a grocery store, they are a trucking company, they are in shipping, warehousing and manufacturing. There are a lot of things going on. But Andy was literally prototyping his ability to lead Amazon, through his work at AWS”.
The decision to name Jassy as the new CEO completes the company’s shift from a retailer to a tech company in the key areas including cloud and artificial intelligence, writes CRN.
Bezos intends to focus on new products and early initiatives, but there is no doubt he retains a high level of influence over the company.
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