NEW DELHI: Andy Jassy who joined Amazon in 1997 as a marketing manager and made its Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) a distinct leader, will take over as Amazon CEO in about six months and for him, more enterprises need to unlock digital transformation and begin their Cloud journey post-pandemic.
In 2003, Jassy founded Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a team of 57 people and in April 2016, he was promoted from senior vice president to the CEO of AWS. Today, AWS has nearly a $50 billion annual run rate and is growing exponentially. The Cloud arm of e-commerce giant Amazon is now the fifth largest enterprise IT company in the world, ahead of companies like SAP and Oracle — driven by the growth of cloud computing in the infrastructure technology space especially in the pandemic times.
“If you look at AWS, as an example, to grow to a $46 billion revenue run rate with 29 per cent (year-over-year) growth meant we had to grow at an incremental $10 billion in the last 12 months to get there; that is much larger than you’ll see elsewhere in the cloud,” Jassy said in December during the annual “Re: Invent” conference.
“It took us 123 months, or a little over 10 years, to grow to a $10 billion business. Then it took us 23 months to go from $10 to $20 billion and 13 months to go from $20 to $30 billion, and then just 12 months to go from $30 to $40 billion,” he noted. According to Gartner’s recent market segment analysis, AWS continues to have a very significant Cloud market segment share at about 45 per cent — more than double that of the second-placed provider.
According to him, whether it is compute, storage, database, analytics, machine learning, IoT or robotics, “you get a lot more functionality natively on AWS than anywhere else”. “We have a much broader partner ecosystem than other players,” he said recently.
Born on January 13, 1968, Jassy graduated from Harvard College, where he was advertising manager of The Harvard Crimson, before earning an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is also one of the minority owners of the Seattle Kraken in the National Hockey League. A shy guy like Bezos, in his Twitter bio, Jassy describes himself as “married” and the “father of two kids”.
He is also a self-proclaimed “big sports/music/film fan,” and an “experienced buffalo wings eater”. For him, India is one of the fastest growing markets. In 2018, he said that the Asia-Pacific region has huge potential to write the next growth story for Amazon Web Services (AWS), with India playing a key role in Cloud adoption among both enterprises and the governments.
“The business in the Asia-Pacific region is very broad and is growing very quickly. The business is growing rapidly in China, India, Singapore, Australia and South-East Asian countries,” he said during a press conference.