Walmart goes to the cloud to close gap with Amazon
February 16, 2018
One of Walmart Inc’s best chances at taking on Amazon.com Inc in e-commerce lies with six giant server farms, each larger than ten football fields.
These facilities, which cost Walmart millions of dollars and took nearly five years to build, are starting to pay off. The retailer’s online sales have been on a tear for the last three consecutive quarters, far outpacing wider industry growth levels.
Powering that rise are thousands of proprietary servers that enable the company to crunch almost limitless swathes of customer data in-house.
Most retailers rent the computing capacity they need to store and manage such information. But Walmart’s decision to build its own internal cloud network shows its determination to grab a bigger slice of online shopping, in part by imitating Amazon’s use of cloud-powered big data to drive digital sales.
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