Amazon Web Services will reorganize its Sales, Marketing, and Global Services (SMGS) group to “lay the foundation for accelerated customer impact and growth in the years ahead,” according to an internal memo Monday morning.
The goal is to “improve the customer experience by better aligning our customer-facing teams, resulting in increased agility, scale, and efficiency,” writes Matt Garman, AWS senior vice president of sales and marketing.
The memo, which Amazon provided to GeekWire, makes no mention of layoffs. (See full text below.) The company declined to comment further on the implications of the changes.
The reorg will attempt to bring new order to the AWS sales organization after years of rapid expansion. Among other changes, Garman writes that AWS wants to put its specialists and technical experts in closer contact with customers and regional teams; improve collaboration among its various teams; and enable faster decisions by regional AWS leaders who work directly with customers.
AWS, the cloud market leader, is under persistent pressure to maintain its growth in the face of stiff competition from Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others. AWS revenue rose 12% in the third quarter to $23 billion, equaling its second-quarter growth rate but far below growth in excess of 30% in 2021 and early 2022.
The move comes as major cloud players position themselves to capitalize on the growth of artificial intelligence. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said recently that he sees a “gigantic new generative AI opportunity” for AWS, predicting that growth in AI will generate “tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AWS over the next several years.”
It also comes a few weeks before Amazon’s big cloud conference, AWS re:Invent, Nov. 27-Dec. 1, where AWS CEO Adam Selipsky and other executives are slated to announce new products and present their vision to customers.
Read the full memo from Garman below.
Team,
At AWS, we work back from our customers in everything that we do, and have delivered impressive results for our customers. I continue to be proud of the work each of you is doing to prioritize our customers’ needs and help them transform their businesses and organizations worldwide.
We serve customers and partners of all sizes, across virtually every industry, sector, and country. We have seen strong growth over the past several years, and the opportunity for sustained customer impact and growth ahead of us is even greater. Customers tell us that they highly value our domain expertise, but they also want us to better understand the context of the industries, sectors, and geographies where they operate. As we look to the future, this is our opportunity to reduce complexity and inconsistency, and invent and simplify how we operate, how we go to market, how decisions are made, and most importantly, how we connect and collaborate across our teams to build and maximize impact with our customers.
Today, I am excited to share several changes to our organizational design and operating model. These changes will enable us to better serve our customers and position AWS for continued growth in the future.
- We will organize around a more globally consistent organization and operating model across SMGS;
- We will align customer-facing teams for large accounts by industry, where scale permits;
- We will land more specialist and technical expertise close to customers;
- We will simplify connection and collaboration between customer-facing teams to improve the overall customer experience and better meet customer needs;
- We will organize around integrated Area/Country team structures that provide tight symmetry and connection to global expertise across all functions;
- We will drive more customer-focused decision making closer to the customer.
This new organizational design will improve the customer experience by better aligning our customer-facing teams, resulting in increased agility, scale, and efficiency. We will increase the scale and impact of our global industry teams, and drive deeper industry connection with customers across more accounts. These changes will also improve our ability to respond quickly to changing market conditions, customer needs, and tech advancements by empowering local leaders and managers to make high-velocity decisions closer to the customer.
For SMGS employees, this new organization and operating model will provide clearer roles and responsibilities; simplify customer and partner collaboration; and provide stronger access to career development opportunities both within country and across SMGS.
I am excited about this opportunity for us to think big, work backward from the voice of our customers, and lay the foundation for accelerated customer impact and growth in the years ahead. While some organizations will experience more change than others, many of us will experience changes to our cross-organization mechanisms and ways of working. Today’s announcement focuses on the foundation of the organizational changes that will be effective on Jan 1, 2024. Over the next couple of months, we will continue to finalize the implementation plan and communicate additional details. As we finish out Q4 and FY2023, it is important that we stay focused and finish the year on a strong note.
Each of my leaders will be sending more detailed information on the specific changes to their organizations, and additional insights on today’s announcement can be found here.
Matt
