Amazon says it won't name a new chief executive for its Portland subsidiary, AWS Elemental, after founding CEO Sam Blackman died in August.
Instead of a new CEO at Elemental, Amazon appointed Alex Dunlap, an executive at its Seattle headquarters, to take over as general manager of the Portland business.
Dunlap had been Elemental's chief operating officer before Blackman's death; prior to that, he had been an executive in Amazon's huge cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, since 2007.
"Sam was one of a kind and irreplaceable so we're continuing down a path that we started at the time of the acquisition by combining management strengths from AWS and AWS Elemental," Keith Wymbs, Elemental's chief marketing officer, said in a written statement.
Amazon remains "committed to Portland," Wymbs said, and expects to continue growing here. He wrote that Elemental will continue to support employee volunteering and civic activities to benefit the community.
"Sam was a huge advocate for change and that includes how we handle the business, even in these most unlikely of circumstances," he said. "His spirit will always be at the core of what we do as technology innovators and customer advocates."
People inside Elemental, who asked not to be identified talking about internal company matters, say that though Dunlap lives in Seattle he is frequently at Elemental's Portland office. And they say AWS CEO Andy Jassy seems committed to retaining Elemental's distinct identity within Amazon.
Blackman co-founded Elemental Technologies in 2006 and grew it into one of the largest of a new generation of Oregon tech companies, focused on software instead of the state's historical specialty in computer hardware.
Elemental adapts video for online streaming across devices, from smartphones to tablets, to PCs to full-sized TVs. Its clients include HBO, Comcast, ESPN and many others.
Amazon paid $296 million for Elemental in 2015 and later changed its name to AWS Elemental. But Amazon kept the Portland office and retained Blackman as CEO until his sudden death at age 41.
Elemental grew rapidly with Amazon's backing and more than 400 people work at its new corporate office in the former Oregonian Building on Southwest Broadway. About a fifth of those work for other Amazon departments.
"One of my big goals for the company is to prove that Portland is a good place to grow and invest for the long term," Blackman said in an interview the week before his death.
A tireless advocate for Portland, Blackman hoped that Amazon would use Elemental as a springboard to a greater Oregon presence as the tech giant exhausted Seattle's pool of technical workers.
Since then, though, Amazon has indicated it will seek a second headquarters to absorb the bulk of the company's growth, potentially up to 50,000 workers. The Portland area joined 237 other cities making bids but handicappers rate the region an extreme longshot, primarily because of Portland's proximity to Amazon's current headquarters in Seattle.
That doesn't mean Elemental can't continue expanding in Portland if its business grows, and people inside the company say it has continued adding jobs. But if Amazon chooses a second headquarters somewhere else than it will be competing for resources with a much larger facility in another city.
And now, Amazon will be making its site decisions without a vocal advocate in Portland.
-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699