Apple’s iCloud Tech Head To Leave, Adding To Exec Exits
Since 2018, Michael Abbott has overseen data center infrastructure for several services and products that have become key to Apple’s revenue. Beyond iCloud and iMessage, these offerings include FaceTime and iCloud Mail as well as Apple Business Essentials and Schoolwork.
Michael Abbott
The head of Apple’s infrastructure for iCloud and other services like iMessage is reportedly leaving the iPhone maker, joining other executives who have left in recent months.
Michael Abbott, Apple’s vice president of cloud engineering, is set to depart in April, according to a Friday report by Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CRN has reached out to Abbott for comment.
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Since 2018, Abbott has overseen data center infrastructure for several services and products that have become key revenue generators for Apple. Beyond iCloud and iMessage, these offerings include FaceTime and iCloud Mail as well as features like iCloud data encryption, Find My and Emergency SOS.
Abbott has led infrastructure too for Apple Business Essentials, a mobile device management solution the company introduced in 2021, several months before it discontinued its more comprehensive Fleetsmith service. His infrastructure purview also extends to Cloudkit, a service for third-party app development, as well as Schoolwork, an app that lets teachers share assignments with students.
Bloomberg noted that Apple has increasingly moved workloads away from its on-premises infrastructure to cloud instances hosted by Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.
The news of Abbott’s impending departure arrived after several other executives have left the company, Most recently, according to Bloomberg, this included Peter Stern, who left in January after leading the business side of Apple’s iCloud, Apple One and TV+ bundles as vice president of services. Stern and Abbott both reported to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services.
Services have become a key revenue driver for Apple. In the company’s 2022 fiscal year, which ended last September, services revenue was $78.1 billion, nearly 20 percent of Apple’s total sales last year.
In the first quarter of Apple’s 2023 fiscal year, the company’s services hit a new sales record of $20.7 billion, a 6 percent increase from the same period last year. That contrasted with Apple’s first-quarter device revenue, which declined 7 percent year-over-year to $96.4 billion.
Other Apple executives that have left in the past several months include Vice President of Industrial Design Evans Hankey, Chief Information Officer Mary Demby, Vice President of Online Retail Anna Matthiasson and Chief Privacy Officer Jane Horvath.