Walmart and Microsoft Team Up to Accelerate Digital Innovation

Walmart has established a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to further accelerate the retailer’s digital transformation, empower its associates worldwide and make shopping faster and easier for millions of customers around the world. As part of the partnership, Walmart has chosen Microsoft as its preferred and strategic cloud provider tapping into the full range of Microsoft’s cloud solutions. 

“Walmart’s commitment to technology is centered around creating incredibly convenient ways for customers to shop and empowering associates to do their best work,” said Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO. “Walmart is a people led, tech empowered company, and we’re excited about what this technology partnership will bring for our customers and associates. Whether it’s combined with our agile cloud platform or leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to work smarter, we believe Microsoft will be a strong partner in driving our ability to innovate even further and faster.”

Walmart is already using Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads and is now embarking on a broad set of cloud innovation projects that leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications.

“Walmart is a pioneering retailer, committed to empowering its employees and delivering the best experience for its customers wherever they are,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “The world’s leading companies run on our cloud, and I’m thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.”

The flexible, secure and rapidly scalable global technology will significantly accelerate Walmart’s ability to execute in three key areas:

Digital Transformation. The investment in Microsoft Azure is a continuation of Walmart’s cloud journey and extends across Walmart’s family of brands and international businesses – allowing it to leverage Microsoft’s public cloud to:

• Capitalize on depth and breadth of Microsoft’s compute capacity
• Seamlessly manage workloads in an elastic environment
• Leverage expanded access to new toolsets to innovate faster
• Drive a more cloud native environment and therefore continue to manage cost

Innovation.  There are numerous benefits to operating at scale as Walmart builds a global IoT platform on Azure – from connected HVAC and refrigeration units to reduce energy usage in thousands of U.S. stores or applying machine learning when routing thousands of trucks in the supply chain.

Associates. Through this partnership, Walmart is investing in its people with a phased rollout of Microsoft 365 providing associates with the productivity tools to foster a culture of collaboration, creativity and communication. Microsoft’s modern workplace platform supports connected teams and breaks down silos – with access to a full range of tools including Microsoft Workplace Analytics, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft OneDrive, Walmart associates will have access to leading collaboration, productivity and sharing tools so they can save time and work better.