New AWS CEO Matt Garman: Everything You Need to Know
Effective from this week (3rd June 2024), Matt Garman is the new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
He takes the reins as the third CEO of the world-leading cloud computing company from Adam Selipsky, who recently announced his resignation. Matt was the first product manager of AWS and helped to build and launch numerous core services for the company.
As new CEO, Matt's vision will be instrumental in helping the company to progress even further in the global cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) race. He listens to customers and is eager to highlight that security will always be the company’s number one priority.
From Amazon internship, to global CEO
Having first started at Amazon in 2005, Matt has amassed more than 20 years of experience within the company building his knowledge and a strong customer base. Having worked as an MBA intern, he joined the company full-time in 2006 as one of the first product managers at AWS.
Back then, the worldwide sales team at AWS consisted of just three people.
With this comprehensive experience, Matt spent his time creating the company’s first service-level agreements, defining new features and creating new pricing plans.
He then became the first product manager for EC2, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, leading product management in the early years of the product. Eventually, Matt became the general manager of all AWS Compute services in 2016, before moving to lead WW Sales, Marketing, Support and Professional Services in 2020.
With such a broad range of experiences at AWS, Matt holds such a unique range of abilities and has an incredible understanding of the company’s customers and business. He will be able to harness his product leadership and problem-solving skills to define the next era at AWS, something which Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy is excited by.
“Matt has an unusually strong set of skills and experiences for his new role,” comments Andy. “I’m excited to see Matt and his outstanding AWS leadership team continue to invent our future - it’s still such early days in AWS.”
AWS: Expanding global innovation with AI
As a company, AWS is fundamentally built on the principles of outstanding service, security and operational performance. It continually pledges to innovate to solve customer problems with the power of disruptive technologies, including generative AI (Gen AI).
With the power of AI accelerating at such a rapid pace, businesses are having to find new ways to be innovative so as to not fall behind their competitors. As a result, the mission of AWS is to help customers build any type of Gen AI application to perform well, but to also be secure and sustainable.
One such example is the AWS partnership with SAP, with both companies announcing an expanded collaboration in May 2024 to enhance cloud ERP experiences and unlock greater enterprise innovation with Gen AI. Both companies seek to make it faster and easier for companies to incorporate Gen AI into their business data.
“Gen AI is going to disrupt and change almost every industry and customer experience in the world,” comments Matt in an AWS interview. “It’s an area where we have invested heavily, and will continue to do so. AWS is well positioned to build it. We have some of the world’s greatest developers, AI experts and technology.”
Speaking on his appointment to CEO, Matt says: “Over the last 18 years I have been fortunate enough to get to work on many different aspects of the AWS business, but one constant has been the world class talent and the unwavering customer obsession of the people I have gotten to work with.
“I am more optimistic than I have ever been for the potential of innovation and growth ahead of us, and I look forward to helping us move faster, invent more and operate as one team to help our customers.”
He highlights in the above interview: “Our number one priority right now is exactly the same as it’s always been since I started, which is to deliver a secure and operationally excellent set of services for our customers. They are trusting us with their business and it has to be up and it has to be secure - and it won’t change with me in this role.”
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