Good luck with that strategy Wal-Mart.
Don’t you mean vs Amazon?
Wal-mart has tremendous leverage and AWS has tons of competition. And yes the title is wrong.
Still, it’s probably Apple’s fault somehow.
This is very true.
Snowflake Computing Inc., a data-warehousing service, was approached by a Wal-Mart client about handling its business from the retailer, Chief Executive Bob Muglia said. The catch: Snowflake had to run those services on Azure.
I think I see the problem… so many sensitive snowflakes!
Isn’t Amazon way bigger in the retail space than Walmart at this point?
Walmart is the #1 corporation in terms of revenue, according to Wikipedia. Whatever that means.
It does but it’s number 1 in the space for a reason. I see this as something akin to big companies that force their own to eat their own dog food, or as much as possible, avoid the competitor for anything. It happens all the time.
I can also tell you as a former consultant, that is a great opportunity to drive up costs and/or billings. “Well, per your direction, we did things exactly as you requested.” IT spending will be going up for Wal-Mart.
Ya, so Walmart does in fact dwarf Amazon in terms of both revenue and profit, which honestly surprised me.
But there are some interesting trends at the end of these data sets.
Amazon’s revenues are continuing to grow rapidly, albeit still far behind Walmart’s. But Walmart looks like they peaked in 2014 for revenue, and profit on 2012, and is now dropping. But it’s not clear whether that was an anomaly, given the lack of recent data.
Walmart can’t do a whole lot to increase its profitability, other than by growing revenue. Being a bricks and mortar supermarket is a low-margin business, and they’re operating at the far pile-em-high-and-sell-em-cheap end of the spectrum. Whereas Amazon could become vastly more profitable fairly easily (in the short run), just by not spending as much on R&D, or not buying Whole Foods. And its revenues are growing fast in places Walmart can’t realistically play in, like AWS.
This story was about wal-mart pressuring its suppliers not to use Amazon’s cloud. If switching to Azure or Google Cloud or whatever is more expensive for the vendors they may try to pass those costs downstream but walmart is not exactly known as a weak negotiator. They’ll tell them to eat sand.
True, but only because they bully vendors/suppliers that way. All of them from what I’ve heard. Trust me, there would still be an opportunity there for anyone on the supplier or consulting side.
As someone that’s used Azure, fuck Azure. If that ends up being Wal-Mart’s choice, good luck to the folks during implementation and support.
That brings up a good question, @stusser, is Wal-Mart 100% in-house IT?
Yes, they use several of the huge indian outsourcing firms. I know they use both Tata and Wipro.
I’ve yet to work anywhere that didn’t use indian outsourcing. And I fully expect if I ever lose my job, it will be to someone not in the country. It sucks.
I’ve used AWS a bit and it’s pretty solid. Can you explain why Azure is bad?
Surely. Note that we don’t use it anymore, but my guess is the negatives are still there. To summarize:
- Compared to AWS, support sucks. But wait, why not just self-learn and get it done yourself? Well because compared to AWS, any online documentation ALSO sucks.
- Some strange bugs. Create something, then find out it’s not running. Get it running but find out it can’t be accessed all of a sudden. Sometimes things created to work together can’t talk to each other. AWS seems flawless in comparison.
- Performance vs AWS shows a distinct slowness to what should be the same things. This includes the setup of your infrastructure. Plan for longer times for implementation, because each little thing within Azure takes a LOT longer than in AWS.
Do a Google search on Azure performance sucks. Trust me, it does.
Good to know. We’ve had a customer who was potentially interested in using Azure for something, instead of our normal AWS based solution. I suspect we could port our stuff over to it easily enough, but it’s still good to know issues folks have had.
All this is true. But, Azure has improved tremendously in the past 2 years. It’s on an upward trajectory.
On the other hand, fuck Wal Mart for endorsing Azure. Now I feel dirty using it.
I would believe that, and it sits with our timeline for leaving them. I’m glad to hear they are doing better. Do you run AWS and if so are they more competitive between the two?