Oracle hires AWS marketing VP Ariel Kelman as new CMO

Oracle has hired Ariel Kelman to be its new chief marketing officer, two people familiar with the matter said. Kelman is joining from Amazon Web Services, where he had been vice president of worldwide marketing for six years.

The move represents a victory for Oracle, which has trailed AWS in the market for cloud infrastructure companies rent to operate websites and applications. The two companies have become increasingly bitter rivals in recent years: Oracle executives have criticized AWS , and AWS CEO Andy Jassy has spoken negatively about Oracle. AWS said in October that Amazon’s consumer business had switched off its last Oracle database.

Kelman replaces Rupal Shah Hollenbeck, a former Intel executive who left earlier this month. At AWS he was a top executive. He joined AWS from Salesforce, where he had held marketing roles, as head of worldwide marketing in 2011, and in 2014 he became AWS’ vice president for worldwide marketing in 2014, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before joining Salesforce Kelman spent two years at MicroStrategy and co-founded a start-up, Ventaso.

AWS announced several new appointments in an internal email on Friday, a spokesperson told CNBC.

Rachel Thornton, a vice president who had worked on field and partner marketing, replaces Kelman. Prior to joining AWS she spent time at Salesforce, as well as Cisco and Microsoft.

Matt Garman, who had been vice president of compute services, is taking on new responsibilities spanning sales and marketing in a chief operating officer-like role. Garman, who has worked on AWS since 2006, recently joined Amazon’s top circle of executives known as the S-team. Thornton will report to Garman, who in turn will report to AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

Dave Brown, a vice president leading the team behind the core EC2 service who joined in 2007 as an engineer on EC2 in South Africa, where it had been developed, will take over Garman’s previous work.

AWS led the cloud infrastructure market with about 48% in 2018, while Oracle was not one of the top five providers, according to Gartner. Meanwhile, Oracle has remained a leader in database software.

In 2018 Oracle stopped disclosing its cloud infrastructure and platform revenue, a development that some analysts took as a negative sign about the company’s prospects in those areas.

Oracle declined to comment for this story. Garman and Kelman didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

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