San Francisco: Amazon has filed a lawsuit against a former employee of its cloud computing business after he joined Google Cloud, alleging that his new appointment violates the terms of his non-compete agreement with Amazon Web Services.
In his LinkedIn profile, Brian Hall who served as Vice President of Product Marketing at AWS, describes his current designation as “waiting to work as a VP, at Google”.
According to a report in GeekWire, lawyers for Hall filed a response to the lawsuit on Monday 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.
In the lawsuit that Amazon filed last month, 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.
Amazon alleged that Hall and Google refused Amazon’s request to modify his role at Google and added that Hall’s proposed position at Google threatens “immediate and irreparable harm to Amazon”.
This is not the first time Amazon filed a lawsuit in Washington state to enforce non-compete clauses in employment contracts.
Another former AWS sales executive, Philip Moyer was sued by Amazon after he accepted a position with Google Cloud last year.
A judge agreed to limit certain aspects of Moyer’s role at Google for the term of the agreement, said the report.
