Amazon gears up for 2020 by naming new head of sales for its cloud division - Bloomberg

Amazon is girding its loins to combat Microsoft and Google by naming one of its engineering executives as the head of sales and marketing for its cloud unit.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo to his employees on Friday that said Matt Garman will now oversee the cloud unit's sales and marketing teams. AWS' previous marketing chief, Ariel Kelman, has left the company, Bloomberg reported.

Prior to his new role, Garman ran the engineering teams that are responsible for Amazon's rented computing power services, including the sale of server racks to businesses.

Garman joined AWS in 2006, which was the same year AWS was founded and launched its first major services, which included storage and elastic cloud compute. AWS provides computing, storage and networking tools that companies can use to run a variety of applications.

AWS finished the third-quarter with $9 billion in revenue, which was a bit short of analysts polled by FactSet that had projected $9.1 billion. AWS is still shouldering the bulk of Amazon's quarterly profits, and its 35% revenue growth rate easily exceeded Amazon's revenue growth of 24%.

In his new role, Garman reports to Jassy. Garman was also named to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' S-team last month, according to Bloomberg. The S-team is responsible for setting Amazon's cooperate policies and is comprised of some of its top executives.

While Amazon Web Services holds a commanding lead in the cloud sector, Microsoft and Google are working to close the gap. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Alibaba are, respectively, the top-four public cloud providers, according to an October report by Synergy Research Group (SRG).

With the public cloud market continuing to grow by 40% per year, Amazon’s share remained at around the 40% mark in the third quarter. While Microsoft, Google and Alibaba are all slowly gaining ground, even if their market shares were combined they would still trail Amazon by a wide margin, according to SRG.

RELATED: Amazon protests Pentagon picking Microsoft for its $10B JEDI cloud contract

Last year, Amazon Web Services lost out on the U.S. Department of Defense's 10-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Microsfoft, but it's contesting that decision.

Also last year, Microsoft and Google  invested heavily in new technologies, such as Kubernetes for Microsoft, as well as building out new data centers to keep pace with the capacity demand.  Google CEO Sundar Pichai said last year his company would invest more than $13 billion for building new data centers and offices across the United States with major expansions in 14 states.