News

Meet the man in the cloud

Amazon

Who is Andy Jassy? The pivotal person responsible for the Amazon Web Services empire will now take the reign on the profit machine it is today.

For the first time in the company’s 27-year-history, Amazon is welcoming a new CEO. It started as an online marketplace for books and is now an e-commerce powerhouse that is recognized as one of the big five tech giants amongst Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple.

Andy Jassy is now getting the chance to change Amazon’s iconic landscape and drive its web services capabilities. Andy isn’t foreign to the company, nor the era of cloud computing. He is the founder of Amazon Web Services, according to the company’s website, a cloud hosting product that creates the infrastructure used by millions of companies, schools, and governments to run websites and apps.

Amazon in the late ‘90s, the company was years away from thinking about the cloud and still focused solely on e-commerce. Andy, 53,  joined Amazon in 1997 after Harvard Business School (HBS). Talking in a podcast, he told The Disruptive Voice that he didn’t know what his job was going to be or what his title was going to be when he took his last exam at HBS on the first Friday of May in 1997, and started at Amazon the following Monday.

AWS has since grown into a high performing cloud platform that is leader in the market alongside Oracle and Microsoft. It is predicted that Amazon controls about a third of the entire cloud infrastructure market, more than its next closest competitors (Microsoft and Google) combined, according to Synergy Research.

Andy will commence his new role as CEO in the third quarter of 2021, Amazon announced at the beginning of February this year. Jeff Bezos will transition as the current CEO into the role of Executive Chair.

“Amazon is what it is because of invention. We do crazy things together and then make them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO in February.

“If you do it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. That yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive. When you look at our financial results, what you’re actually seeing are the long-run cumulative results of invention. Right now I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition.”

At a time when Amazon is still at the forefront, Andy’s background in steering AWS is predicted to boost Amazon’s business strategy across the AI, cloud, and e-commerce industries.

“It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time,” Andy told a virtual crowd at the all-digital Amazon re:Invent last December. “To do it, you’re going to reinvent yourself, and often you’re going to have to reinvent yourself many times over.”

Send this to a friend