Sample Executive Profile

Biographical Summary

Jassy, a native New Yorker with a penchant for sports bars (he built one in his Seattle basement) and wing eating contests (he organized his own), lives and works in Seattle, heading up Amazon.com's innovative cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS rents out Amazon.com's vast technology infrastructure–created to manage its massive retail business–to enterprises, small companies and web developers in the form of data storage, computing power, and other services. "What we're really doing is allowing other companies to build their applications on top of our technology infrastructure," he says. A 2012 Business Insider article calls Amazon's cloud "the go-to choice for Silicon Valley startups. It puts the power of a supercomputer into the hands of anyone, affordably, without getting stuck if your startup tanks. EC2 is literally ranked the 42nd most powerful supercomputer in the world." According to IDC, Amazon Web Services will pass $1 billion in revenue in 2012, though Amazon does not break out AWS figures.

Biographical Highlights

• Born c.1968
• Jassy graduated with a BA from Harvard University (1986 - 1990) and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School (1995 - 1997)
• After earning his MBA, Jassy founded and managed his own marketing consulting company (1997)
• Various positions, including Marketing Manager, Amazon.com (1997-2002)
• Vice President and Technical Assistant, Amazon.com (2002-2003)
• Vice President, Associates and Web Services, Amazon.com (2003-2005)
• Vice President, Web Services, Amazon.com (2005-2006)
• Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services and Amazon Infrastructure, Amazon.com (2006-present)
• He authored the business plan for Amazon's entry into the Music business and served as both its Director of Product Management and General Manager; started and built the Customer Relationship Management team; served as Director of Marketing; worked as Technical Assistant to Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos
• In interviews, Jassy has been secretive on a few topics, including how many people work on his team and whether or not Amazon Web Services builds and maintains data centers in shipping containers. "We don't disclose how many people are in the business," he said in 2009, "but...if you look at what's happened over the last year or two in terms of what the team has delivered, you can tell it's not a team of 10 people."
• He was named one of the Smartest People in Tech 2011
• He lives in Seattle and enjoys spending his free time with his wife and two children

Personal Attributes and Interests

• Son of Margery and Everett L. Jassy of Scarsdale, N.Y. His father was a senior partner at a New York law firm and his mother was a trustee of a New York theater company.
• Jassy married Elana Rochelle Caplan in 1997 in Santa Monica, Ca. Caplan is a fashion designer, who has worked for Seattle-based Eddie Bauer Inc.
• For more than a decade, Jassy has been organizing a competitive eating event called the Tatanka Wing Eating Contest. "It's a great way to get people together outside of work, under a very important common theme, which is eating wings."
• Jassy has described himself as "a sports fanatic" and says he built a sports bar called the "Helmet Head" in his basement that features seven TVs. "I grew up in New York and my Dad, who's really a sports freak, had season tickets to the Rangers and Giants, so I went to those games very regularly as a kid," he says. "When I moved out to Seattle, my friends and I were going out to sports bars on Sunday to watch football games and my dream was to be able to recreate that environment in my basement. So these same guys come to my basement now instead of going to the sports bars."
• Jassy says he has retained all of his New York sports team allegiances but that he loves living in Seattle. "I never expected to be out here long-term. I always expected I would be back in New York. But it's really hard to beat the quality of life and the beauty of it and the outdoor activities. And I'm really lucky to get to work at a place that is as exciting and engaging as Amazon." He adds that "I still have some New York in me. I still walk across the street against the "Don't Walk" sign."
• In 2010 Jassy said that contrary to popular belief, cloud computing will ultimately help the hardware market - not hurt it. "I think that [cloud computing] is going to lead to more hardware," Jassy said on at the Web 2.0 Summit. "Look at the amount of startups that are able to get started now without having to lay-out all that capital. Look at the amount of innovation."
• According to an Amazon SEC filing, Kathy Savitt, Jassy's sister, is the CEO and director of Lockerz, which purchases web services from an Amazon affiliate on arm's length terms. Lockerz paid approximately $2 million for web services used in 2010, with an additional $640,000 owed for web services used in 2010 (of which they have paid over $590,000 as of April 27, 2011), and is expected to pay at least $1 million for web services to be used in 2011.

Other Boards and Organizations

• Director, Coupa Software Inc.

Current Focus

• Enhance performance and scalability of public cloud infrastructure: In January 2012, Amazon launched the DynamoDB, a NoSQL based new database service that it says will enable customers to store and modify huge amounts of unstructured content while proving rapid access to data. Amazon's new service looks to vastly extend upon the limitation of its SimpleDB service, the company's existing non-relational data store. With its fast access to data, DynamoDB might be one of the most scalable database services yet offered by a public cloud service provider. "It enables customers to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases so they don't have to worry about provisioning, patching, configuration, cluster management, things like that. With DynamoDB we believe we've finally cracked the code in giving developers what they've always wanted -- a seamless scalability and zero administration. We handle all of the work that's required behind the scenes to make sure the customers' databases are consistently fast and secure," Amazon said.
• Going Global: AWS has been expanding globally in recent years, first into Asia with a major technology center in Singapore, and now into South America with newly launched Brazilian data centres. The company also has data centres in Europe and is reported to have another data centre planned for development in Sydney, Australia, in 2012. The AWS cloud now powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in approximately 190 countries around the world. "Many South American customers have been using AWS in existing AWS Regions across the US, Europe, and Asia," said Jassy in December 2011. "With the launch of the new South America (Sao Paulo) Region, these customers can now run their applications in Brazil, which significantly reduces latency to end-users in South America and allows those needing their data to reside in South America to easily do so.
• Targeting public sector business: Amazon stepped up the security and access features of its cloud services in an effort to attract more government agencies as customers. In 2011 Amazon announced the Amazon Web Services GovCloud, a service that complies with the International Traffic in Arms Regulation. ITAR regulates how government agencies manage and store sensitive data, including defense data.
• Partnership with Dassault Systèmes: In 2011 Dassault Systèmes (3DS) and Amazon Web Services announced that they are working together to enable companies of all sizes to get started quickly with 3DS Version 6 solutions on AWS. "Dassault Systèmes is a pioneer in 3D and PLM solutions. This new offering will enable our joint customers to more easily collaborate on complex, globally distributed, product designs and plans," said Jassy. "We are extremely pleased to work with Dassault Systèmes to help them deliver innovative cloud based solutions to the market."
• New business offering: Amazon announced in 2011 a new tool that combines its Web services and helps businesses simplify management of their websites and applications. The new Elastic Beanstalk service automatically handles deployment details like provisioning compute capacity, load balancing between servers, autoscaling up and down, and monitoring the health of the application. Amazon aims to increase revenue by persuading companies to rent its servers and ditch their own. Bezos said the Amazon Web Services unit -- which generated about $500 million revenue in 2011, according to Barclays Capital -- will eventually become as big as its retail site. Elastic Beanstalk targets both novices and experienced developers. In January 2011, Amazon also participated in a new $9 million investment in Sonian, an e-mail archiving firm. "We're pleased to work with Sonian to offer customers of all sizes an information archiving solution that is affordable, scalable and highly reliable," said Amazon.
• Deal with Microsoft: Microsoft announced in 2010 that it had signed a deal with Amazon.com that lets each company tap into the other's patented technology, including that for hot-selling Kindle electronic readers. Amazon will be paying the software giant as part of the agreement, but declined to specify the amount. "We are pleased to have entered into this patent license agreement with Amazon.com," said Microsoft. The agreement clears the way for Microsoft's proprietary software and open-source programs used by Amazon.com to be woven together more tightly without concerns about patent violations. Each company gets access to the other's patent portfolio under the terms of a deal covering a broad range of products and technology, Microsoft said.
• Long-term bet: Jassy says that he is frequently asked whether Amazon Web Services is "an experiment;" he replies that the company is unequivocally committed to its "cloud computing" business. "We believe it's going to be a very significant free cash flow generating business that's going to be very meaningful over the long term, and that's the feeling from the most senior levels up in the company all the way down," he says.
• Security of web services: One of the concerns about cloud computing-especially from enterprise companies-is how secure it is. "Since Amazon started, we've been very passionate about security," says Jassy. "We know businesses are building their businesses on top of our cloud and our platform. If it's not secure and it doesn't perform optimally, they don't have a business and we don't have a business. Our No. 1 goal is operational performance and security."
• Growing the business organically and through acquisition: In addition to expanding AWS internationally, Jassy says that Amazon will expand its Web Services business through acquisition. "Web services for Amazon is no different from the retail and seller businesses that we also have which we're always looking for ways to grow the business and add capacity that are unique and that we don't think we can easily build ourselves...if the right opportunity presented itself, we would consider it."

Key Challenges

• Publicity in the wake of the outage: Following the outage referenced below, Roman Stanek, CEO and Founder of GoodData wrote an "open letter" to Jassy which was published all over the web. "I believe that the way AWS behaves needs to change. You built the leading infrastructure-as-a-service provider with a level of secrecy typical of a stealth startup or a dominant enterprise software platform vendor. It works for Apple - they deliver a complete integrated value chain. But it is not your position in the cloud ecosystem. Today's outage shows that secrecy doesn't and won't work for an IaaS provider. Compete on scale and enterprise readiness, and part of readiness is being open about your internal architectures, technologies and processes...My ops people were ready at 1:00 am PT to start our own disaster recovery, but status updates completely failed to indicate the severity of the situation. We relied on AWS to fix the problem. Had we had more information, we would have made a different choice...Your customers need a fundamentally different level of information about your platform...We live in the Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Wikileaks days! There should not be communication walls between IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and customer layers of the cloud infrastructure. Tear that wall of secrecy down, Mr. Jasse [sic]. Tear it down!"
• Multi-day outage with permanent data loss: In April 2011, Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage, knocking customer sites offline and permanently losing some customer data. Amazon has billed its cloud-computing services as a cheap and safe way for businesses to outsource their data centers. The outage is evidence that companies can't wholly rely on cloud services to handle important functions, said Vanessa Alvarez, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. "Customers need to start asking tough questions and not assume everything will be taken care of in the cloud, because it will not," Alvarez said. "They shouldn't be counting on a cloud service provider like Amazon to provide disaster recovery." It represents a big setback for AWS, which has long reassured nervous customers that cloud computing is safe, secure and reliable. Security and business continuity are two of the biggest concerns among companies considering porting their data into the cloud.
• Attracting enterprise customers: Jassy said that the company "had always anticipated that our services would initially appeal to the startup space and that's because with any big computing shift like web services or cloud computing, it's often the smaller customers that get the revolution going." And while some pioneering larger companies such as Eli Lilly, Autodesk and the New York Times have signed on, many enterprises are still "kicking the tires."
• Adequate capacity: Capacity planning for cloud services is critical and complicated. Jassy says that AWS has "very involved and sophisticated capacity planning processes...We look at demand trends, big customers that are coming, and we keep a certain amount of buffer based upon what we project." He says that the company will need additional data centers. "Handling that peak, and thinking about how to manage our capacity for the rest of the year so we're not way over-provisioning, is what helped us prepare for the Amazon Web Services business...if you have parts of your business that are seasonal, the excess capacity is costly. If we have a business that allows other companies to scale up when they need it and then scale back down when they don't need, it is a huge cost advantage for them. That's something we do internally at Amazon."
• Operating performance: While Jassy says that AWS has a 99.95% uptime guarantee, he adds that there's no "magic bullet...operating these services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year at the performance levels that our customers expect...it's not easy to do...We had to get good at this at Amazon to operate Amazon.com and one of the reasons we got in the (web services) business a few years ago was we realized we had a competency in running very reliable, scalable services at low cost to run Amazon.com...There really is no substitute for experience and for continuing to evaluate where you can improve and applying resource and effort at improving that."

Additional Information