Best Buy to Accelerate Cloud Tech Implementation
Best Buy is investing in cloud infrastructure services and engineering talent to support its digital growth and innovation plans.
Best Buy plans to apply Amazon Web Services' compute, storage, database, and security services to create more interactive, virtual experiences for consumers, such as live product demos with experts. Cloud tech also supports Best Buy’s Totaltech program, which provides tech assistance to members, delivered via an AWS-powered chatbot.
As part of this collaboration, Best Buy will be accelerating its cloud migration and cloud-first strategy, moving additional retail operations workloads from on-premises data centers to AWS. Additionally, Best Buy will expand its use of AWS capabilities and AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog that identifies software that runs on AWS, to “increase resilience, gain agility, and accelerate innovation.”
Best Buy technologists gain access to AWS Training and Certification’s cloud training curriculum and resources. This will help support the brand’s hiring strategy — Best Buy has committed to hiring 1,000 new employees to its technology team — with 30% of them being Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and women.
Tom Litchford, head of worldwide retail and wholesale distribution at AWS, shared in a blog post that Best Buy was able to deploy an “industry-leading curbside pickup experience in just two days at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic” with assistance from AWS — an example of remaining agile to support evolving customer needs. AWS hopes to continue supporting these initiatives, said Litchford, adding that both companies have a shared culture of innovation.
Brian Tilzer, chief digital and technology officer of Best Buy Co. said this is the latest step in the company’s commitment to deliver outstanding experiences for its customers.
“Not only will AWS’s cloud technologies help us in this work, but in combination with our culture of innovation and reinvention, they will give our teams invaluable development opportunities as we continue to grow our skilled teams and remain one of the best places for amazing technology talent to thrive,” said Tilzer.
“Best Buy is transforming the way people buy technology and is using AWS’s comprehensive set of cloud services to accelerate its innovation,” said Werner Vogels, vice president and chief technology officer of Amazon.com, Inc.
