Channel Conflict, Discrimination, Shake-Ups: What’s Going On at AWS?

… committed to a timeline or responded to the call for an employee task force. Selipsky also has not named the firm AWS has hired to look into the charges of discrimination and harassment. Amazon did tell CNN, though, that the company is woman-owned and led.

AWS and Amazon are, of course, not the first or only technology vendors to confront accusations of discrimination and harassment. The problem has run rampant in the sector since its inception. In just the past year, examples of troubling or shocking behavior come from Google Cloud, Exertis, Oracle, Alteryx and Solid8. What AWS does in response to the range of allegations in front of it will be telling.

What’s Going On with All the Personnel Changes?

AWS’ Adam Selipsky

Finally, with Selipsky officially on board as AWS CEO as of July 5, the cloud provider is undergoing some significant shifts in its employee roster.

Charlie Bell, who has worked for AWS for 23 years, is departing. He was considered a top candidate for Jassy’s role when Jeff Bezos named Jassy as the new CEO of Amazon. Bell also is a member of Amazon’s elite S-team. That group, made up of about two-dozen people, provides strategic advice to the company’s CEO. Peter DeSantis will take Bell’s place as head of utility computing. Prasad Kalyanaraman will take over for DeSantis is the infrastructure and network services group.

This week, too, Kamlesh Talreja, general manager at AWS, said he has taken a job with Goldman Sachs as co-head of engineering. Talreja joined AWS 16 years ago. Also, in April, Splunk snagged AWS’ Teresa Carlson. She had served as vice president of public sector and industries.

On the channel side, Ashish Dhawan recently took on the managing director role under Chris Sullivan. He’s overseeing global partner sales for enterprise workloads, he wrote in a LinkedIn post. Dhawan has moved to the United States after spending three years at AWS India. Vaishali Kasturae now holds Dhawan’s previous position.

Sullivan is new to his job as well. He recently took over as global director of worldwide systems integrators and strategic alliances, replacing David Fuess.

Amazon does not announce personnel changes, nor does it comment on them. One cannot definitively say, then, that all the shake-ups come because of the new AWS CEO. To be sure, some could reflect typical career moves. Others, such as Bell’s, do leave more questions than answers. Even so, the memo Selipsky sent to employees contained nothing but praise.

“Charlie has been instrumental in so many of the most important initiatives at Amazon, it would be impossible to list them all,” Selipsky wrote in a copy of the email obtained by Channel Futures. “His impact has been deeply felt across the entire company and literally across decades. We wish him the best and thank him for all of his contributions and for the innovation he has driven.”