Ex-AWS Exec Charlie Bell Officially on Board at Microsoft, with a Hitch
Find out what’s keeping the former AWS executive from starting his new job overseeing a new unit.
Charlie Bell, former senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, officially has assumed the role of executive vice president at Microsoft. In fact, he’s leading a new engineering organization: Security, Compliance, Identity and Management.
“As digital services have become an integral part of our lives, we’re outstripping our ability to provide security and safety,” Bell wrote on his LinkedIn page on Sept. 15. “It’s constantly highlighted in the headlines we see every day: fraud, theft, ransomware attacks, public exposure of private data and even attacks against physical infrastructure. This has been weighing on my mind and the best way I can think to describe it is ‘digital medievalism,’ where organizations and individuals each depend on the walls of their castles and the strength of their citizens against bad actors who can simply retreat to their own castle with the spoils of an attack.”
Bell defected to Microsoft, AWS’ No. 1 competitor, last month. He did so after Andy Jassy became the new CEO of Amazon. Bell widely was expected to become Jassy’s successor and take on the AWS CEO mantle. Instead, the job went to Tableau Software’s Adam Selipsky. Not long after Jassy and Selipsky made their respective transitions, news broke that Bell was moving to Microsoft.
Now, Microsoft is trying to surmount Bell’s non-compete contract with AWS.
“We believe Charlie Bell’s new role can help advance cybersecurity for the country and the tech sector as a whole, and we are committed to continuing our constructive discussions with Amazon,” Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of communications, said on Sept. 15. “We’re sensitive to the importance of working through these issues together, as we’ve done when five recent Microsoft executives moved across town to work for Amazon.”
Bell did not address the non-compete tussle in his LinkedIn post. Rather, he focused on his new responsibilities, which will start once Microsoft and Amazon reach an agreement.
“We all want a world where safety is an invariant, something that is always true, and we can constantly prove we have,” he wrote. “We all want digital civilization. I believe Microsoft is the only company in a position to deliver this and I couldn’t be more excited to work with this talented team to make the world safer for every person and organization on the planet.”
Bell spent almost a quarter of a century at Amazon. Over the last 15 years, he worked at AWS and reported to Jassy. His areas of expertise included product, pricing, software development and operations. Leading a security division seems a little outside those competencies, but the strategy could have more to do with his proven leadership skills.
ZDNet reports that Microsoft will move a number of people from the Cloud + AI and Experiences + Devices teams under Bell. Those changes will affect Microsoft 365 Security, Compliance and Management; Identity; Security; and the Chief Information Security Office unit.
It will be interesting to watch Microsoft and Amazon’s discussions play out. In 2019, Washington state banned non-compete contracts, except for employees making more than $100,000 per year or contractors making more than $250,000. The terms also can’t last for more than 18 months. Both Microsoft and Amazon are based in the Seattle area.
Amazon has garnered a reputation for going after former employees who breach non-compete agreements. Yet it may behoove the cloud giant to gracefully let go of Bell. A lot of folks leave Microsoft for Amazon, too, as Shaw noted in his statement. The mindshare goes back and forth and, ultimately, the cloud industry benefits. AWS might do well to avoid a brouhaha, especially since something must have happened behind the scenes to prompt Bell to leave after more than two decades.
It will be interesting to watch Microsoft and Amazon’s discussions play out. In 2019, Washington state banned non-compete contracts, except for employees making more than $100,000 per year or contractors making more than $250,000. The terms also can’t last for more than 18 months. Both Microsoft and Amazon are based in the Seattle area.
Amazon has garnered a reputation for going after former employees who breach non-compete agreements. Yet it may behoove the cloud giant to gracefully let go of Bell. A lot of folks leave Microsoft for Amazon, too, as Shaw noted in his statement. The mindshare goes back and forth and, ultimately, the cloud industry benefits. AWS might do well to avoid a brouhaha, especially since something must have happened behind the scenes to prompt Bell to leave after more than two decades.
Amazon Web Services is down one executive in the form of Charlie Bell. On Wednesday, top AWS competitor Microsoft officially acknowledged Bell as an executive vice president, although not in the Azure division. Rather, Bell will oversee a new division focused on security.
But he’s not in charge just yet. There are some legal issues to overcome.
Our slideshow above offers the skinny on Bell’s new role and what Microsoft is doing to get him started.
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