From taking pictures of Microsoft publicly to being the first AWS product manager for Amazon EC2, here are six things partners and consumers want to know about AWS’s new CEO, Matt Garman.
From Amazon EC2’s first product manager and his assistance in implementing the first Amazon Web Services SLAs, to why Amazon CEO Andy Jassy chose him as the new CEO of AWS, CRN breaks down the six important things you want to know about Matt. Garman.
The $100 billion cloud company announced Tuesday that its chief executive, Adam Selipsky, will step down from his role after three years at the helm of AWS and a total of 15 years at the Seattle-based company.
Matt Garman, an 18-year veteran at AWS and most recently senior vice president of sales, marketing, and services, will take the reins on June 13.
“Over the more than 18 years, I’ve been fortunate to be able to work on many other aspects of the AWS business, but one constant has been the world-class skill and unwavering obsession of the other people I’ve worked with for the client. “I’m more positive than ever about the prospects for innovation and expansion that lie ahead, and I look forward to helping us move faster, invent more, and work as one team to help our customers. »
[Related: New AWS CEO Garman Will ‘Crush’ You; Partners are surprised by Selipsky’s departure]
Garman will have his hands full, as he will be guilty of keeping AWS as a global leader in cloud computing, as well as achieving Amazon’s ambitious goal of becoming a global AI powerhouse.
Here are the six things AWS customers, investors, and partners want to know about AWS’s new CEO, Matt Garman.
In 2022, Garman criticized Microsoft’s licensing strategy on LinkedIn, calling it a “troubling admission” of “anti-competitive tactics. “
“MSFT’s reaction is not to do the right thing for consumers and replace its policy so that all consumers can run MSFT software on the cloud provider of their choice; rather, under the guise of meeting the needs of European generation, MSFT proposes to cloud providers that it has a less competitive share and allows MSFT software to run only on those vendors,” Garman wrote in a July 2022 article.
“It’s not fair when it comes to licensing and it’s not what consumers want,” he said. “Customers around the world continue to tell us that MSFT’s discriminatory licensing practices are costing them millions of dollars and the freedom to work with whomever they want. “”.
Garman’s public tactics against AWS’s biggest AI and cloud rival are very typical of tech executives.
As AWS’s long-term CEO, it will be appealing to see if Garman is a more vocal CEO than Selipsky when it comes to competitors like Microsoft and Google.
Click to read the other five wonderful things you know about Matt Garman.
Garman’s AWS Story: From Amazon Intern to AWS CEO
Matt Garman is 48 years old and first joined Amazon when AWS was founded in 2006.
Garman graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a bachelor’s degree in commercial engineering and earned a master’s degree in engineering the following year. In 2004, he attended Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and earned his MBA.
Garman officially started at Amazon as an MBA intern in the summer of 2005 and joined the company full-time in 2006 as one of AWS’s first product managers. His first role was as a senior product manager for software development for Amazon EC2.
Within 3 years, Garman was promoted to director and general manager of Amazon EC2. From 2013 to 2020, Garman served as Vice President of AWS Compute Services.
“Early on, Matt helped create our first SLAs, outline new features, and create new pricing plans,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement. “He then became our first product manager for EC2 and led their product control of EC2. early formative years. During this time, he also led the team that designed, launched, and operated EBS [Amazon Elastic Block Store].
In January 2020, Garman was promoted to senior vice president of global sales, marketing, and services at AWS. He began reporting directly to then-CEO Jassy.
Garman will take over as CEO of AWS on June 3.
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon: “Matt knows our consumers and our company, as well as the world”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (pictured) says he is positive about the long term for AWS with Garman at the helm because of his skills.
“Matt has an unusually strong skill set and enjoys his new role. He’s very customer-focused, he’s an excellent product manager, inventive, a skilled problem solver, he’s right, he has the best judgment, and he’s willing to take meaningful action. “Jassy said.
The Amazon CEO added that Garman has been one of the “apprentices” Jassy has met and that his experience on both the product side and demand generation is essential.
“In his 18 years at AWS, he has been one of the most productive students I have ever met. Matt knows our consumers and our company as well as anyone else in the world, and has senior leadership that delights with any of them. the aspect of the product and the call to the generation,” said Jassy.
Crucially, since 2020, Garman has been a member of Jassy’s leadership team, dubbed the “S Team,” which helped outline AWS’s goals, strategy, corporate culture, and crisis management.
“I’m thrilled to see Matt and his AWS leadership team continue to invent our future; AWS is still in its infancy,” Jassy said.
GenAI Strategy by Matt Garman, AWS Marketplace, and Partners
CRN spoke with Garman six months ago, in November 2023, about AWS Partners, generative AI, and AWS Marketplace.
When asked why partners deserve to bet on AWS in 2024, Garman said there are more prospects for AI and cloud “ahead of us than we are. “
“The outlook through 2024 is that generative AI will drive consumer migration to the cloud,” he said. “How are consumers reaping the benefits of Gen AI?In reality, consumers can’t take full advantage of GenAI’s merit if their knowledge is rarely highly organized and, in fact, in the cloud. You’ve noticed it time and time again: if your knowledge is locked locally in proprietary systems, it’s very difficult to harness the power of AI to read a set of other sources of knowledge. , make compelling inferences and make useful profits for your business. . . From a partner’s perspective, this is a great opportunity to get involved and help consumers scale faster, or they’ll be left behind.
When asked where partners play in GenAI, Garman said AWS has taken a “partner-centric approach” to AI from the beginning, such as building all the foundational models available to consumers on Amazon Bedrock.
“We didn’t just focus on our own models or models from a single vendor, we said, ‘We need all models to be available. ‘So we have models from Anthropic, Cohere, Stability AI, Meta, AI21 [Labs], etc. . , as well as proprietary models,” Garman told CRN. Partners how consumers can take advantage of this. They can dive into a money services use case or a threat use case and say, “This is how generative AI is applied, not just as a chatbot on your website, but how to combine all of those things to get more threat analysis. ” Here’s how to improve the productivity of your internal employees. Accenture, Deloitte, and the world’s largest GSIs [global formula integrators] are developing innovative GenAI practices on AWS to help consumers solve exactly those problems. “
Finally, Garman said that AWS Marketplace is a “positive flywheel” that will take his company to new heights.
“Our end consumers like to get products on this marketplace. This provides them with a window. This earns them a bill. From a buying perspective, it makes everything a lot simpler,” Garman said.
Garman Advances AWS’s “One Team” Concept
One of Garman’s key spaces has been the company’s AWS strategy, called “One Team”.
For example, Garman helped implement a new career progression program called Growth Conversations in its marketing and sales organization, aimed at giving workers the opportunity to communicate with managers about their upcoming career opportunities.
Garman has also contributed to overlapping roles and redundancies within his organization, adding that he prevents other groups from contacting the same visitor and saves money when a deal closes. Their sales and marketing team is now organized into verticals, such as education and finance, compared to a regional model.
“I’m more positive than ever about the prospects for innovation and expansion that lie ahead, and I look forward to moving faster, inventing more, and functioning as one team for our customers,” Garman said.
Garman: “AWS is more than a company”; “Organizational announcements” to come
In his first statement following the announcement of his new CEO position, Garman said the company he’s worked for 18 years is more than just a company.
“To me, AWS is more than just a company. We are a team of missionaries who work passionately to help the lives and businesses of our customers every day,” Garman said.
Garman said that as he transitions into his new leadership role, AWS workers expect some internal adjustments.
“Naturally, we’ll be making some organizational changes as part of this transition, so keep an eye out for the main points on that in the coming weeks,” Garman said. “In addition, I will be at several AWS town halls over the next month, and I look forward to connecting directly with more of you at them.
Overall, Garman said he was “honored” and “thrilled” to take the helm of AWS.
“It has been a privilege to work alongside you for the more than 18 years, and I am honored to have the opportunity to continue to do so in this new and more important role,” he said.