Walmart signs sweeping cloud Agreement with Microsoft, joining forces against Amazon

(Bigstock Photo) Last season’s purchase of Whole Foods raised tensions between Amazon and the retail community to new heights, and Walmart, the retail giant of the 20th century, is now making it clear that the enemy of its enemy is its buddy. RELATED: Why it may be time for Amazon to seriously look at spinning off Amazon Internet ServicesWalmart signed a”strategic partnership” agreement with Microsoft late Monday night, pledging to expand its usage of this second-place cloud infrastructure player as part of”a wide set of cloud innovation endeavors,” it declared in a media release. The two firms have entered into a five-year agreement that insures both Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, together with plans to overhaul existing Walmart programs in”cloud-native” fashion with assistance from Microsoft engineers, they said in a media release. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella produced no bones about the competitive facets of this arrangement in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Monday night: Amazon’s strain using the retail neighborhood”is absolutely core to this,” he explained. Over the last year because the Whole Foods purchase, retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Kroger are distancing themselves in Amazon’s booming cloud business, which creates the lion’s share of their company’s profit. And recently marketed Azure chief Jason Zander informed GeekWire in an interview last month that Microsoft was likely to go after retail clients with fresh energy in the coming calendar year, hoping to exploit the unease with which traditional retailers hold Amazon. That tension has led some to wonder — including yours truly — when Amazon Web Services could fare better as a standalone business that may compete for mega-business such as Walmart’s workloads without the baggage out of the corporate sibling. Such a breakup would be rather cluttered, and AWS CEO Andy Jassy has scoffed at the idea many times through time, but AWS rivals could get significant ground over the cloud leader when other retail clients follow suit. Microsoft’s announcement rounds outside exactly what had been a less-than-stellar Prime Day to the online retailing giant, which suffered several glitches inside its powerful e-commerce engine Monday as Prime Day festivities kicked away.

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