Adam Selipsky, the new CEO of Amazon Cloud plans to focus on tailoring industry-specific products, such as automotive, telecommunications and healthcare industries. This is a shift from the earlier broad-based solutions that the company provided for use by maximum customers.
Adam Selipsky, in an interview with Bloomberg TV, said that the push would be to target cloud services to specific industries as a reflection of the Amazon to act as ‘insurgents. The world is fast-changing and so much that we have to behave differently than what we did yesterday “, he said.
As per Bloomberg news, rivals Google Inc and Microsoft Corp., which has rolled out cloud packages for certain industries, have influenced Amazon Web services to a certain extent. For example, Microsoft Corp. offers targeted clouds to retail, healthcare and space industries.
Over the years, Amazon has released several industry-specific products, but it was never a priority historically as per cloud-computing analysts and employees. Andy Jassy, CEO of Parent company Amazon.com and predecessor of Selipsky, had predictably avoided one-off or specific product offering. He had also resisted tailoring cloud services to specific requirements by the government several years ago, though he ultimately relented.
AWS is considered a leader in renting computing infrastructure provided to companies in almost all sectors. According to Selipsky, customers are now demanding sector-specific and new products. Hence the focus is on financial services, automotive, Telcom and health industries.
Sector-specific products have their challenges, and any shift to customized products increases the risk of spreading too thin or slicing the strategy too fine. Some workers and executives of AWS are leaving the company for new areas and start-ups as it is difficult to do broad-based enterprise work, according to a former employee in an interview with Bloomberg.
Cloud software applications sold by Microsoft are more profitable and more than the infrastructure services offered by Amazon, which is its monopoly.
The right hand of Jassy
After Jassy was picked to replace Jeff Bezos as the CEO of the Amazon group, Selipsky was tapped as chief of AWS in March this year. He spent five years at the top in Tableau and guided the Seattle company with a reboot of its software business of data visualization and a $15.3 billion sale to Salesforce.com in 2019.
Selipsky was the right hand of Jassy at AWS before he joined Tableau. He served in a chief operating officer-like role overseeing sales, marketing, customer service and technical support. Selipsky had joined the company in 2005.
When asked if Amazon needs to focus on office productivity apps like Google’s Workspace or Microsoft’s Office, Selipsky mentioned that AWS has the most profound cloud services, and it is crucial for AWS to build more applications. “It could be human resource or marketing “, he said by citing Amazon Connect, which is a call centre program that demonstrates AWS ability to build specific applications over the general-purpose cloud platform”.
