Walmart, the American retail giant, unveiled, on June 23, the operation of its first hybrid cloud solution. Called the “Triplet Model”, this tool will allow the leader in physical commerce to reduce its hosting costs as well as its dependence on technology giants offering a cloud service.
Walmart specializes in the cloud
“Triplet Model”, Walmart’s hybrid cloud service uses third-party servers, hosted by Microsoft and Google, but also private servers stored in the chain’s stores. Suresh Kumar, Chief Technology Officer for Walmart explains in an interview for the wall street journal that ” hybrid cloud allows us to take the best of what public cloud providers can offer and combine them with something that is really designed for us “.
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Using this hybrid solution, Walmart claims to have over 10,000 edge nodes, allowing users to not lose efficiency and capacity. Thanks to them, the so-called “central” nodes are not solicited, guaranteeing better system operation. The retail giant’s hybrid cloud servers are spread across the United States.
Since its launch, the “Triplet Model” has allowed Walmart to reduce its annual cloud spending by 10 to 18%. It protects the business from outages, a common problem in the industry, and increases the speed of access to store applications.
The rivalry between Walmart and Amazon
Competition is fierce in the cloud market. Microsoft, Google and Amazon reign supreme in the field and share nearly 65% of the sector’s shares. And if Walmart is forced to use the services of the first two companies, it keeps its distance from Amazon, its main competitor in terms of online commerce. In August 2021, Walmart signed an agreement with Adobe to offer its e-commerce technologies to other companies on a subscription basis. It relies in particular on its marketplace MarketPlace Pulse to compete directly with Amazon.
This isn’t the company’s first attempt to tackle the e-commerce juggernaut. A few years earlier, in 2018, an agreement between Walmart and Microsoft led to a partnership. For four years and until 2023, Microsoft services such as the Microsoft 365 software suite, but above all Azure, its cloud service, have been used within the company.
“Triplet Model” demonstrates Walmart’s desire to increasingly turn to cloud technologies. The company has also announced two new augmented reality features to visualize digital furniture in a room or scan a store’s shelf to see the products therein in detail. Walmart indicates in a communicated that ” to create these experiences on a mobile device in the palm of your hand, it takes a powerful cloud computing system and a team of technicians who can design and build an architecture that makes everything possible “.