Amazon alleges the employee’s new job violates his noncompete clause, which, in Amazon’s view, should have prevented the employee from working for a competitor for 18 months after leaving Amazon.
As Bishop points out, Amazon filed a similar legal action in 2012. That’s when it sued a former Amazon Web Services vice president, Daniel Powers, who also left for Google. A judge ruled that Powers was allowed to work for Google, though the court forbade him from approaching Amazon customers for nine months.
The employee in question this time is Zoltan Szabadi, who was leading Amazon’s Strategic Alliances Emerging Partners unit. He was responsible for finding partners that sell Amazon’s cloud and offer services for it.
In May, he moved to Google to do essentially the same job. Google and Szabadi agreed that Szabadi would not approach any of Amazon’s customers or strategic partners, nor help Google recruit any more Amazon employees, for six months.
This is a huge area of competition between the two companies. One reason Amazon is considered heads-and-tails above other cloud competitors is the number of apps and partnerships it has. Google is currently building its roster of partners to compete
