Meet the 11 power players helping Amazon's massively profitable cloud uphold its market dominance over Microsoft and Google

Amazon; Jemal Countess/Getty; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty; Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

• We've identified 11 of the top executives that Amazon Web Services has assembled to fend off challengers including Microsoft and Google.
• AWS is the still cloud market leader, but rivals are gaining. Microsoft, for example, is expected by analysts to take "significant" market share from Amazon Web Services in the near future.
• Meet Amazon's ace cloud team below.
• Click here to read more BI Prime stories

Amazon has assembled a team of high-powered executives to retain its dominance and fend off rivals including Microsoft and Google.

AWS still leads the cloud-computing market, and it's not even close. Gartner's most recent public-cloud market-share report, released in July, showed Amazon's 2018 market share was more than three times the size of Microsoft's - about 47.8% to 15.5%, respectively. Google trailed with 4 percent.

Complimentary Tech Event

Transform talent with learning that works

Capability development is critical for businesses who want to push the envelope of innovation.Discover how business leaders are strategizing around building talent capabilities and empowering employee transformation.Know More

It's also massively profitable. The last time that Amazon reported earnings, it said that AWS had booked some $9 billion in revenue, and that the unit accounted for some 72% of the company's nearly $3.2 billion in operating income for the quarter.

Amazon Web Services is so important to the retailer that the unit has its own CEO, Andy Jassy, and garners significant attention from overall Amazon CTO Werner Vogels - both of whom report directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos himself.

But its challengers are on the move - and making important inroads into the market.

Microsoft in the past year secured a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract over Amazon, though Amazon is now challenging the decision in court. Microsoft also inked major partnerships with companies including Salesforce, SAP and Oracle. Some analysts expect the company to gain "significant" market share from Amazon Web Services in the near future.

Google, meanwhile, earlier this year hired a new CEO who, according a source who spoke to Business Insider in August, has a five-year goal to become "at least the No. 2 cloud" and a strategy to get there.

Meet Amazon's ace cloud team, charged with keeping AWS at the top of the heap: