‘With a distinguished career in technology leadership, Chet brings extensive experience in AI, platform services and enterprise solutions, most recently as chairman and CEO of DataStax,’ says AWS CEO Matt Garman in announcing the hiring of Chet Kapoor.
AWS has hired tech innovator and former DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor as its new vice president of cybersecurity to elevate security in its ever-growing AI portfolio.
Kapoor (pictured) has had a stellar IT career and was the former CEO of DataStax, which was acquired by IBM earlier this year, as well as the former CEO of Apigee, which Google acquired for $625 million in 2016.
“With a distinguished career in technology leadership, Chet brings extensive experience in AI, platform services and enterprise solutions, most recently as chairman and CEO of DataStax,” said AWS CEO Matt Garman in an email to employees that was seen by CRN.
“While [at DataStax], he pioneered the development of Astra DB and integrated real-time AI capabilities, revolutionizing how companies build and deploy AI-powered applications at scale,” Garman added.
AWS confirmed that Kapoor is the $124 billion company’s new vice president of security services and observability.
Kapoor’s DataStax, Google And IBM Career
Kapoor was the leader of DataStax—a provider of cloud-hosted and managed Apache Cassandra database and Pulsar data service—for the past five years. DataStax’s Astra DB cloud platform and DataStax Enterprise NoSQL and vector database are built on the open-source Apache Cassandra database for managing large amounts of data distributed across multiple locations. In addition, DataStax owns an AI platform for building and deploying AI applications, as well as an enterprise AI platform that incorporates Nvidia AI technology.
IBM acquired DataStax this summer for an undisclosed amount.
Kapoor also was chairman and CEO of Apigee, an innovative API management and predictive analytics software provider.
Kapoor successfully took Apigee public before it was acquired by tech giant Google in 2016.
He stayed at Google in a vice president role leading the Apigee business unit until he joined DataStax in 2019.
Kapoor also has held top executive roles at IBM, Gluecode Software and BEA Systems. He was CEO of Gluecode when IBM acquired it in 2005.
New AWS VP Will Report To Garman
At AWS, Kapoor will lead the company’s efforts to boost its security portfolio as the Seattle-based cloud giant doubles down on AI innovation.
He will report directly to Garman.
“Outstanding security and operations in the cloud is of vital importance to every single one of our customers,” said Garman in his email to employees.
“As we have seen our customers’ cloud deployments get more complex over time, providing outstanding external Security and Observability services has become a more important part of our business, and AI is completely changing what is possible and what is needed in this area,” Garman said. “To help lead us to the next phase of product innovation and growth, I am excited to [hire] Chet Kapoor.”
Garman said Kapoor will bring his “customer-obsessed mindset and deep understanding of AI and platform services” to drive AWS strategic initiatives across its security services, governance and operations portfolios.
“I look forward to seeing him engage with our teams, customers, and partners as we continue to innovate and scale our security and observability services,” Garman said.
