Most consumers think of Amazon as an online retailer, but many businesses think of the company as a supplier of computing power and storage, thanks to the efforts of Jassy, who heads up Amazon Web Services.

Jassy, 43, had previously built Amazon's customer-relationship management team and wrote the business plan for Amazon's entry into music sales.

He got the nod to run web services when CEO Jeff Bezos decided to leverage Amazon's expertise in operating scalable technology infrastructure and data centers.

Amazon's foray into cloud computing has been a boon to tech innovation, enabling companies to launch web-based and other computing-heavy businesses without having to run their own data centers.

Indeed, an outage of AWS revealed just how many companies rely on the service (both Quora and Foursquare were affected).

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Jassy will become CEO of Amazon after Jeff Bezos leaves the role.^[11]