Stephen Orban Takes Over as AWS Marketplace Head

As of today, Stephen Orban leads the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

He takes over from David McCann, who joined AWS as the head of Marketplace in 2014. An AWS spokesperson said McCann wanted to move out of an operational role. Later this year, after a personal leave of absence, McCann will assume a leadership position on Charlie Bell’s team. Bell serves as senior vice president of AWS.

AWS’ Stephen Orban

Orban, meanwhile, is no stranger to AWS. He, too, has worked for the public cloud provider since 2014. He started there by guiding the enterprise strategy division. Then he took on the mantle of general manager of AWS Data Exchange and AWS Control Services. Now, Orban is adding general manager of AWS Marketplace to that list of titles.

“I’m going to continue to do for Marketplace what any good service owner at AWS does, which is work backward from the customer with a long-term view, and build what they need,” Orban told Channel Futures.

That means bulking up the software and services available in AWS Marketplace and tying it all together — all with ISVs, managed service providers and other channel partners in mind, he said.

“Demand for cloud services globally has never been greater and continues to grow, so Marketplace is already a requirement,” Orban said. “We’ll continue to look at ways we can better serve our customers, not just in the U.S., but globally.”

From a TI-99 to Top Corporate Leader

Orban comes to AWS Marketplace with an extensive background in computers and engineering that started early.

“I was eight when I found a TI-99 in my uncle’s attic, and I was hooked,” he said.

In the intervening years, Orban built the IT infrastructure for Bloomberg’s financial and sports divisions. He next worked for Dow Jones as CTO/CIO. The great challenge there was one many organizations still face: turning IT from a cost center into a revenue driver. Orban met the challenge. That’s also where he met AWS.

“I became an AWS customer and in under three years … we reallocated more than $100 million in IT spending from infrastructure to product experience,” Orban said. That further translated into “releasing software from once a quarter to hundreds of times a month.”

Orban’s success in those efforts invited yet another possibility — the chance to join AWS’ enterprise strategy group. He did, and a few years later, moved over to the Data Exchange unit, where he worked closely with AWS Marketplace.

“We built Data Exchange with the Marketplace team, using a lot of the same capabilities,” Orban said. “Having been a pupil and a partner of Marketplace, I’m super excited to have an opportunity to help customers modernize their IT estates faster.”

‘Huge Opportunity for 2021’

Indeed, online marketplaces have come into their own over the last 10 years and continue to supplant the traditional resale model. They have proven a simple, affordable way for channel partners to procure and support platforms for their clients — and, at the same time, to build that much-discussed, coveted recurring revenue base.

Forrester’s Jay McBain

Industry-wide, reliance on online marketplaces has grown faster than experts expected.

“We had predicted 17% of the channel’s business, the vendor’s business, would go to the marketplace by 2023,” Jay McBain, principal analyst of channel partnerships and alliances at Forrester, told Channel Futures earlier this year. However, he added, “we’re starting to think now that it’s going to happen this year.”

The overall figures also will increase by …