Amazon settles lawsuit with ex-AWS executive who joined Google Cloud

San Francisco, July 19 (IANS) A former employee of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud computing business of e-commerce giant Amazon, have now received the necessary clearance to work with his new employer, Google Cloud.

The new job that Brian Hall, who served as Vice President of Product Marketing at AWS, came under a cloud after Amazon sued him in May, alleging that his new appointment violates the terms of his non-compete agreement with Amazon Web Services.

According to GeekWire, Amazon has reached a confidential legal settlement with Hall.

Indicating that he has been cleared to work as Vice President of Product and Industry Marketing at Google Cloud, Hall has changed his title on his LinkedIn profile. Earlier, he described his Google job as “waiting to work as a VP, at Google” and also as “VP in Purgatory”.

In a tweet that contained the link of his LinkedIn profile, Hall tanked all the people who had supported him “in the last few months”.

“I won’t say much more…,” he added, while providing the LinkedIn link.

He took up a new job at Google Cloud in early April after leaving the AWS position in March.

In the lawsuit that Amazon filed in May, the company alleged that Hall was entrusted with an unusual broad view into Amazon’s Cloud product plans, its priorities and its competitive strategy.

Hall’s knowledge about Amazon plans would be “invaluable” to Google if he is allowed to take that parallel position at Google, Amazon alleged in the lawsuit.

Hall “helped develop and knows the entire confidential Amazon cloud product roadmap for 2020-21,” Amazon said in its lawsuit, filed on May 18.

According to a report in GeekWire, lawyers for Hall filed a response to the lawsuit in June in King County Superior Court in Seattle.

The response said that Amazon executives repeatedly led Hall to believe the company would not enforce the non-competition provision of its “boilerplate” confidentiality agreement, in discussions before and after he signed the contract in June 2018.

–IANS

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