Amazon Promotes Cloud Chief Jassy, Bezos Says AWS Will Hit $10 Billion This Year

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services since its launch in 2006, has been promoted to CEO of the industry's top public cloud infrastructure business.

Jassy's promotion, which Amazon announced in a blog post Thursday, comes after CEO Jeff Bezos revealed in his annual letter to shareholders earlier this week that AWS is on track to reach $10 billion in sales this fiscal year. AWS had sales of $7.9 billion during fiscal 2015, and said in January it was on a $9.6 billion annualized run rate.

Bezos said in the letter that AWS is larger and growing faster than Amazon itself was after its first decade in business. He also pointed to AWS' addition of 722 "significant" new features and services in 2015 -- 40 percent more than it added in 2014 -- as evidence that AWS is innovating faster than any other cloud vendor.

[Related: Andy Jassy Is Amazon Web Services' $6 Billion Man]

Jassy, who founded AWS in 2003 with a team of 57 people, has presided over what is far and away the most dominant cloud business on the planet, with more than 1 million customers in 190 countries. AWS launched its first services in 2006, and since then has built that into a portfolio that has redrawn the balance of power in the IT market.

AWS continues to enjoy the benefits of its considerable first-mover advantage, and over the years has consistently put pressure on the enterprise vendor establishment with competitive services. One of its biggest wins to date came in 2013 when it beat out IBM for a 10-year, $600 million deal with the Central Intelligence Agency, which involves building a private cloud-like service for the highly secretive organization.

More recently, AWS has set its sights on Oracle's database business. AWS last month launched Database Migration Service, a service that moves customers' on-premises Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL production databases to the AWS cloud.

John Sankovich, executive vice president at InfoReliance, an AWS partner in Fairfax, Va., said his customers are embracing AWS' Relational Database Service for open source platforms like PostgreSQL and MySQL, along with commercial platforms like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. "This is also impacting database licensing as customers compare traditional enterprise agreement models for on premise with AWS licensing options," Sankovich said.

InfoReliance's AWS business has been growing in the double-digits monthly due to a "tremendous increase in demand" for cloud services amongst its customers, Sankovich told CRN.

Aurora, a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that AWS debuted last year, is now the fastest growing service in AWS history, Bezos said in the shareholder letter. He said Aurora's success is due in large part to the expense and hassle of dealing with existing database vendors.

"Customers have been frustrated by the proprietary nature, high cost, and licensing terms of traditional, commercial-grade database providers. And while many companies have started moving toward more open engines like MySQL and Postgres, they often struggle to get the performance they need," said Bezos in the letter.

Bezos said that AWS, along with Amazon Prime and Marketplace, are examples of big bets the company has made that have paid off. Jeff Wilke, senior vice president of Amazon's consumer business and the executive in charge of those units, has also been promoted to the title of CEO Worldwide Consumer, Bezos said.