Teresa Carlson leaves Amazon Web Services

Carlson will become president and chief growth officer of San Francisco-based Splunk Inc.

Published April 5, 2021 by Jason Roop

Teresa Carlson, the Herndon-based executive who founded Amazon Web Services’ public sector business, is leaving Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing subsidiary to become president and chief growth officer of Splunk Inc., the San Francisco tech company announced today.

Carlson was an influential and visible presence in the Washington, D.C., region for a little more than a decade in her role as vice president of worldwide sector and industries at AWS. She previously served as an executive at Microsoft.

Carlson’s former boss, Andy Jassy, was tapped to replace Jeff Bezos as CEO of Amazon in February. That led to some speculation that Carlson could be an internal candidate to become CEO of AWS. But Jassy announced in March that Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky was taking the job.

With Carlson moving to the data management and cloud services company Splunk, her replacement will be Max Peterson, currently vice president of the public sector’s international business, an AWS spokesperson confirmed.

Carlson’s will start her newly created role at Splunk effective April 19. The company says she will be responsible for driving go-to-market business segments, advancing cloud-first initiatives, accelerating growth and pursuing new market opportunities.

Splunk reported revenue of $2.23 billion last fiscal year — $554 million of which was attributable to cloud revenue, an increase of 77% from the previous fiscal year. Splunk’s customers include Tide, Lockheed Martin Space, California Pizza Kitchen, The New York City Fire Department and the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Together,” Carlson said in a statement, “we will build on Splunk’s legacy of innovation as one of the fastest growing companies in the history of enterprise software.”

Regarding Carlson’s departure, an AWS spokesperson said in an email, “We’re really proud about the work Teresa has done to help public sector customers around the world reimagine digital transformation and achieve mission success, and we wish her the best moving forward.”