10. Jassy, Selipsky Lead Management Changes At Amazon, AWS

Amazon Web Services has become one of the IT industry’s most powerful companies, serving as the operating platform for a huge number of IT vendors in the cloud computing space, as well as providing its own cloud storage, analytics, database and business application services that often compete with IT vendors.

So it was big news in February when Amazon announced that founder, CEO and nascent astronaut Jeff Bezos would step aside from the day-to-day running of the company and that Andy Jassy, who led AWS since its 2003 inception, would replace him as Amazon president and CEO. (The transition took place on July 5.)

Amazon announced in March that it had hired Tableau Software CEO Adam Selipsky (pictured) to take over as AWS CEO. Selipsky, Tableau’s CEO for about five years, previously worked at AWS as vice president of marketing, sales and support. Selipsky officially started at AWS on May 17 and worked with Jassy until he moved into his new post.

At his first appearance at AWS’s re:Invent conference as AWS CEO, Selipsky said the company’s partner ecosystem – and the company’s continued investment in that ecosystem – will be “an incredibly central part of the AWS strategy” and urged partners to “be experts, be trained, be certified, have lots of good people.”

In November AWS disclosed that channel chief Doug Yeum was leaving the AWS Partner Network for a new management post within the retail division of parent company Amazon. About one week later AWS announced that it had hired Cisco Systems executive Ruba Borno to take over from Yeum as of Dec. 6. At Cisco Borno was most recently senior vice president and general manager of the networking giant’s global customer experience centers.