Samira Panah Bakhtiar’s AWS role expands to include telco alongside media and sports

NEW YORK: Samira Panah Bakhtiar has just got a considerably bigger job. The general manager, who has spent close to three years running Amazon Web Services’ media, entertainment, games and sports business, has now been handed the telco organisation as well, giving her charge of the combined global industry business unit spanning telco, cable, media, games, sports, advertising and betting and gaming. It is the kind of expanded mandate that speaks less to reshuffling and more to conviction in the person doing the job.

The scale of what she now oversees is considerable. Panah Bakhtiar’s unit sits at the intersection of two industries that are converging fast, content and connectivity, as streaming, live sports rights and telecom infrastructure increasingly depend on the same cloud backbone. Her own trajectory at AWS has tracked that convergence closely. She joined the media and entertainment business in mid-2018 as director, building teams focused on cloud solutions for media conglomerates and multi-system operators, before being promoted to general manager of the global media, entertainment, games and sports industry business unit in December 2023. Barely three years on, she is now stewarding telco too, building on the foundation laid by Jan Hofmeyr, whom she credited by name for his partnership and leadership.

Her path to this point runs through some of the most consequential rooms in enterprise technology. Before AWS, Panah Bakhtiar spent nearly twelve years at Cisco, rising from account manager for NBCUniversal, AMC Networks, Cablevision and Madison Square Garden to director of media operations, a run in which she was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and helped some of the world’s largest media conglomerates modernise production, contribution and distribution workflows, including the shift to OTT. That decade-plus of relationship-building with America’s biggest content and cable names is precisely the muscle memory now being put to work at AWS, at industry scale.

What stands out beyond the day job is the sheer range of Panah Bakhtiar’s public and philanthropic footprint. She sits on the executive committee of The WICT Network’s board of directors, a body representing over 10,500 members in media and telecommunications, and has previously served on the boards of together1heart and the Somaly Mam Foundation, organisations focused on protecting women and girls from slavery and human trafficking. Her fundraising record there is not trivial either, having helped organise galas and events that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-trafficking causes. She also co-founded Bridge2Act, a technology platform connecting digital publishers and nonprofits so readers could turn into donors in real time, a venture that partnered with major publications and nonprofits to reach millions of viewers.

The AWS reorganisation itself deserves a closer look. Telco and media have historically sat in separate silos at most large technology vendors, but the businesses increasingly compete for the same infrastructure dollars, from live sports streaming to 5G network cores to advertising technology. Combining them under one general manager signals that AWS wants a single, coherent voice negotiating with the sprawling ecosystem of studios, sports leagues, network operators and gaming companies, rather than fragmented pitches from separate teams. Given Panah Bakhtiar’s track record of building high-performing teams and her recognition as a keynote voice at CES, Cannes Lions and Digital Hollywood, AWS appears to be betting on a proven operator to make that consolidation work, and on current form, that bet looks a sound one.