Walmart migrates to Azure with Microsoft partnership

Companies are challenging Amazon in retail and cloud

Walmart has signed a five-year agreement to use Microsoft's cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, in order to make shopping ‘faster and easier' for its customers.

The partnership brings together Amazon's main rivals in retail and cloud computing, and reinforces Walmart's decision to commit to ecommerce.

Walmart, a traditional bricks-and-mortar retailer, has recently warmed to working with technology companies as it works to defend itself against Amazon. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that this shared rivalry was "absolutely core" to the new agreement.

Engineers from both firms will work together to move hundreds of existing applications to a cloud-native environment, as well as migrating a ‘significant portion' of Walmart's walmart.com and samsclub.com websites to Azure.

Walmart already uses Microsoft services for several applications and workloads. Through the partnership, it will expand this to new projects that include machine learning, artificial intelligence and data platform solutions for both customer-facing services and internal business applications.

The retailer is already building a worldwide IoT platform on Azure, which will run devices including air conditioners and refrigerators. It will also use machine learning on several projects, such as routing vehicles in the supply chain.

While Walmart has been working to integrate technology into retail, Microsoft has been examining the same topic from the other direction.

Microsoft has been working on a technology that would eliminate cashiers and checkout lines from stores, as part of a bid to keep up with Amazon's physical retail offering of automated Amazon Go stores. The company has apparently demonstrated the technology to retailers around the world, including Walmart.