Amazon cloud CEO Andy Jassy shuffles ranks, and marketing head Ariel Kelman joins Oracle

Amazon Web Services Inc. is shuffling its executive ranks a bit as a former top marketing executive moves over to rival Oracle Corp.

CNBC first reported today that Oracle has appointed Ariel Kelman (pictured), until recently the vice president of worldwide marketing at AWS, as chief marketing officer. Kelman is replacing Rupal Shah Hollenbeck, a former Intel Corp. executive who held the title of senior vice president and CMO and recently departed Oracle less than 12 months after joining.

Kelman is stepping into Hollenbeck’s shoes after nine years at AWS. The executive served as vice president of worldwide marketing for the last six of those years and, before joining the cloud giant, worked at Salesforce.com Inc. in a similar role. He earlier co-founded a marketing software startup called Ventaso Inc. that raised $65 million in funding.

Kelman’s appointment to the CMO post at Oracle is a win for Oracle, which has been trying unsuccessfully to take on AWS in the public cloud market and faces growing competition from the Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary in its core database business as well. 

But the appointment is perhaps even more notable because it ties into a separate, broader leadership reshuffle going on at AWS that was also revealed today. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy shared the changes in an internal email to employees that was obtained by Bloomberg.

Rachel Thornton, who previously headed the provider’s global field and partner marketing operations, is taking over Kelman’s old post. She will report to longtime AWS executive Matt Garman, who is reportedly being promoted to a “chief operating officer-like” role that will see him oversee both sales and marketing activities. Garman previously led the compute services group inside AWS that manages the provider’s core cloud offerings.

Also reporting to Garman will be Teresa Carlson, vice president of AWS’ worldwide public sector efforts, and Mike Clayville, vice president of AWS’ worldwide sales and business development. Garman’s role heading up compute offerings will be filled by Dave Brown, who has been on the EC2 team since 2007.

It’s the second step up for Garman in two months: The executive was in early December tapped by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to join the so-called S Team, the group of roughly two dozen senior leaders that directs the company’s global strategy. The team also includes three other executives from AWS, including Jassy, utility computing head Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis, who is responsible for AWS’ data centers.

Finally, according to Bloomberg, Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s vice president of AI, will now report to Bell, a step up from reporting to Bell deputy Raju Gulabani, vice president of AWS databases, analytics and machine learning.

Photo: SiliconANGLE