Amazon Web Services’ Dave Levy departs for Google
Dave Levy Vice President of Amazon Web Services speaks onstage during the 2024 Concordia Annual Summit at Sheraton New York Times Square on September 24, 2024 in New York City. Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia Summit
By
Frank Konkel
The senior executive worked at AWS since 2017.
Dave Levy, vice president of AWS Worldwide Public Sector, has left the cloud computing and AI giant for a role with one of its primary competitors: Google.
Levy’s last day was Friday, July 31, an AWS spokesperson confirmed to Nextgov/FCW. A Google spokesperson declined to comment on Levy’s hiring.
Levy joined AWS in 2017 after a 12-year run as Apple’s head of U.S. government sales — first as vice president of U.S. government, nonprofit and healthcare, and ultimately leading AWS’ worldwide public sector business from 2023 onward.
David Appel, who formerly oversaw AWS’ national security and defense portfolio, has stepped into Levy’s former role in acting capacity, according to an AWS spokesperson.
Levy’s departure from AWS comes as the company nears the 15th anniversary of its GovCloud, which debuted in 2011 as the first cloud infrastructure accredited and designed for government customers. In the years since, AWS inked a series of major defense customers to multibillion-dollar cloud contracts, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.
A first-mover in the cloud computing market — Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, or EC2, debuted 20 years ago — AWS remains the dominant market leader in the worldwide cloud computing market with nearly 28% of global market share.
Google’s business continues to grow, too. Google Cloud, the company’s suite of cloud computing services, is steadily gaining market share from competitors AWS and Microsoft, while the company’s AI technology, including its Gemini models, is fueling further growth as private and public sector customers clamor for AI offerings.
After a public falling out with the Pentagon in 2017 over Project Maven, Google launched a business unit in 2022 called Google Public Sector specifically designed to deliver cloud computing, AI and collaboration tools popular with its private sector customers directly to the public sector and Pentagon. Helmed by Google Public Sector Chief Executive Officer Karen Dahut, the bullish maneuver has paid off with Google’s software running in nearly every major federal agency, its latest Gemini models powering the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform and poaching away some longtime Microsoft 365 customers through its Workspace collaboration suite.