AWS senior exec Charlie Bell departs the company after 23 years

Charlie Bell, one of Amazon’s top executives in its cloud business, is leaving the company after 23 years.

AWS senior vice president Peter DeSantis, who worked on global infrastructure, is set to become the new leader for utility computing which Bell was managing, according to CNBC. Prasad Kalyanaraman, a vice president at the company, will assume responsibility for infrastructure and network services.

Bell’s departure is the latest in a string of high-level personnel moves at AWS. Bell was reportedly considered a candidate to replace AWS CEO Andy Jassy when he became Amazon CEO last month, but Tableau CEO and former Amazon employee Adam Selipsky was chosen instead.

Bell has been with the company since 1998 when his business, Server Technologies Group, was acquired by the company, according to his LinkedIn. Before that, he was a manager at Oracle between 1989 and 1996, and a space shuttle flight interface engineer at Boeing between 1979 and 1989.

In a video posted by Amazon Science, he revealed he started at the company when it was “just selling books”. Bell initially led infrastructure before moving to the AWS business in 2006 as it began developing core EC2 and S3 computing and storage services.

In February, the head of AWS Andy Jassy was announced as the successor to Jeff Bezos - seen as a logical next step given Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and would go on to found AWS in 2002.

Following this, in March, Salesforce executive Adam Selipsky was appointed AWS CEO. This saw Selipsky return to AWS after leaving the company in 2016 to become the CEO of Tableau. He spent the previous 11 years as AWS vice president of sales, marketing and support.

Selipsky’s time at Tableau saw the company’s value quadruple as he led its move from licenses to subscriptions. It was eventually acquired by Salesforce in 2019, where Selipsky became a member of its executive leadership board in addition to his role as Tableau CEO.