There’s a war for cloud sales talent between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google and the Amazon Web Services gross sales staff could possibly be significantly ripe for poaching, in keeping with a UBS analyst report on cloud infrastructure revealed earlier this month.
Google, which has recently been spending big to beef up its team, has already employed an “astronomical quantity” of individuals from Microsoft, together with “relationship gross sales reps,” a cloud associate of the so-called Big Three advised UBS analysts. But AWS staff stands out as the subsequent large goal:
There “appears to be some discontent” among the many ranks of the AWS gross sales staff, the associate mentioned, which makes these salespeople “much more susceptible to wealthy provides from Google Cloud.”
The associate’s feedback to UBS — which occured over the second quarter of this 12 months — echo what insiders like Duckbill Group chief economist Corey Quinn recently told Insider about challenges the AWS gross sales, assist, and service groups are dealing with. The hiring pipeline for sure roles on service groups is “bone dry,” Quinn mentioned, partly on account of Amazon’s reputation as a tough place to work.
Amazon didn’t reply to request for remark by time of publication.
The AWS gross sales group had a giant shakeup final 12 months. Matt Garman — a longtime AWS executive with comparatively little gross sales expertise — turned the cloud big’s gross sales and advertising and marketing SVP in early 2020. His promotion seemingly spurred the departures of two seasoned gross sales execs that many thought of to be extra apparent decisions for the function:
Teresa Carlson, who ran worldwide public sector gross sales for 10 years, became Splunk’s chief growth officer final April, and Mike Clayville, who ran subject operations of AWS for greater than seven years, turned Stripe’s chief income officer final September. Two former VPs recommended Garman’s promotion was a factor in Carlson’s and Clayville’s departures.
Before Garman was put in control of AWS’s gross sales and advertising and marketing, he spent seven years working its compute-services staff and, earlier than that, was a part of its core Elastic Compute Cloud server staff.
In addition to the battle over staff, the UBS report additionally pointed to an alarming trend that could threaten the growth of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s clouds: A rising scarcity of IT expertise to assist prospects arrange and handle their cloud applied sciences. That labor scarcity is at an all-time excessive on account of demand for cloud applied sciences, however is especially acute for AWS due to its place on the high, analysts advised Insider.
Do you’re employed on the AWS gross sales staff or have a tip about what is going on on inside the firm? Contact reporter Ashley Stewart by way of encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or electronic mail ([email protected]). Contact reporter Belle Lin by way of encrypted electronic mail ([email protected]) or company electronic mail ([email protected]).
