Amazon Names Retail and Cloud Computing Heads as CEOs

Web retailer Amazon just announced two big promotions for the heads of two of its biggest units, its consumer and cloud computing businesses.

In a blog post that hit just a few minutes ago, Amazon announced that Jeff Wilke, the head of Amazon’s consumer business, and Andy Jassy, the head of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing business, are now CEOs of those respective units.

Essentially Wilke and Jassy have been doing these jobs for some time. Jassy took what seemed at first in 2006 to be a wonky business of selling computing capacity as a service and turned it into what was as of last year a $7.9 billion business that is the envy of no less than Microsoft, Google and IBM among others. Now it’s on track to become a $10 billion annual business by the end of this year.

The new title can’t help but restart recurring murmurs among financial analysts that AWS might be better spun off as an independent business, rather than as part of the larger Amazon operation.

Wilke, on the other hand, runs Amazon’s core retail business worldwide — essentially the $100 billion or so of everything Amazon does that’s not AWS. He has often been considered the most likely to succeed CEO Jeff Bezos in the event he were to step down as CEO.

There’s no sign that assigning these new titles has anything to do with that, but regular readers of the Amazon tea leaves will wonder all the same. “This is not a reorganization but rather a recognition of the roles they’ve played for a while,” the blog post said.

What’s it all mean, if anything? We’ll get a chance to ask Bezos himself next month at our Code conference.