Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

I sold to Walmart for 4 years. In the beginning we believed we were lucky to become vendors. Then we realized how much stress they created. Every single year they would short pay our invoices. We would have to submit a claim with Walmart accounting. This process was completely and utterly time consuming. But the worst of it, they wouldn&#x27;t pay the invoices owed until a year later. It&#x27;s hard to float a $100,000 short pay as a small business.<p>They did much more and I was surprised that they existed this way in business

This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it&#x27;s vendor.<p>On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It&#x27;s rapidly approaching a &quot;too big to be allowed to fail&quot; status, and that&#x27;s awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren&#x27;t written by a generation able to envison entities like this and the current political climate is that they&#x27;d rather die than appear anti-business... I guess the only entities with the power to push back against Amazon are in fact the other major corporate vendors.

Seems as if this is a reasonable request, which is being framed as an unreasonable one.<p>WalMart has asked a Data-Warehousing service (via its customer) to please not do what it does - data-warehouse internal information about sales, revenue, etc - on their retail-competitor&#x27;s servers. Data which could give Amazon sensitive inside information on WalMart&#x27;s operations and financials..<p>I dono if they&#x27;ve made other less-reasonable requests, but the example provided in the article is completely reasonable.<p>I always find it a ironic when I&#x27;ve interacted with startups which have a plan to bring some disruptive thing to market that potentially competes with Amazon or Google, and yet route all their data and communication through these platforms. :)

Is this because they actively want to discourage any revenue going Amazon&#x27;s way from Wal-Mart related business activities, or because they don&#x27;t trust Amazon not to look at the data hosted on their platform?<p>If the latter, then I think that&#x27;s just extreme paranoia. If there was ANY evidence of Amazon doing that it would destroy everyones trust in AWS and I suspect people wouldn&#x27;t be able to move away fast enough (Which actually long term would be good for Wal-Mart).

If Wal-Mart decrees this, put up or shut up. Welcome to business.<p>CEO Diktats about using not using competitor services for anything whatsoever, are as old as Microsoft. Wal-mart is not in the cloud business, so I can only wonder if, as others have commented, it is about data security in AWS domain, since Wal-Mart&#x27;s main competitor is Amazon.<p>We know what Google and Facebook get up to with peoples data, why would Amazon not analyze or try similar to their customers? To have all that technical capability and not be curious about stuff would be a waste.<p>Finally, I think it would be great for everyone (except Amazon), if wal-mart got in to the cloud. Using their leverage to create cheaper cloud would benefit us all.

Wal-mart has expected vendors to bow to its methods and policies for years, no matter how unreasonable or inconvenient. The carrot dangled in front of vendors: The possibility of massive nationwide sales.<p>Now they are dealing with a much more nimble and capable competitor. Yes, Amazon has its own unreasonable policies that squeeze vendors, but at least they have reasonable tech in place and they move fast when it comes to support and service. Case in point: Applying to be a third-party seller on Amazon takes days, Wal-mart Marketplace takes 6 weeks.<p>I am not sure if this latest Walmart policy reflects incompetence, misguided policy, dirty tricks, or a combination of the three, but it serves to push vendors away from Walmart and into Amazon&#x27;s tight embrace.

Years ago I read The Wal-Mart Effect. Basically it was a whole slew of industries that Walmart had dramatically affected. Things like forcing vendors to manufacture in China and building a crazy infrastructure to get &#x27;fresh&#x27; Salmon imported from Chile.<p>I got the impression they would turn the screws on industries to get cost savings via scale. This move seems odd.

I know there&#x27;s some complexity here, but let&#x27;s just take a minute to marvel at the phenomena of Walmart complaining about another company&#x27;s excessive dominance and potential to apply monopolistic power.

Amazon does similar practises, like not selling Chromecast&#x2F;apple TV etc on their site. Is this instance of AWS blockage a big deal? probably not. I wonder if it just slows down Walmarts efforts

&gt; <i>“It shouldn’t be a big surprise that there are cases in which we’d prefer our most sensitive data isn’t sitting on a competitor’s platform,”</i><p>Ok sounds reasonable from an information security standpoint<p>&gt; <i>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><p>¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯

Interesting that Netflix (biggest competitor to Amazon Prime Video) still is on AWS. Not sure who is being savvy and who is being short sighted.

I work in retailtech and this feeling is very common across retailers. Everyone feels like amazon is their biggest competitor and they don&#x27;t want any of their money going (even indirectly) to amazon. Especially when the technology in question is supposed to help them compete better against amazon.

I wonder if this is restraint of trade and illegal. It&#x27;s as if they are telling retailers they can&#x27;t sell to Walmart and Target.

Walmart is notorious for wanting their suppliers to run the way they want it<p>Might be cheaper to not sell to them (though revenue might suffer)

&gt; “Tactics like this are bad for business and customers,”<p>Because Amazon&#x27;s tactics aren&#x27;t bad for business or consumers?

Is the use of &quot;vendors&quot; in the title misleading? The title suggests it refers to people who are supplying WalMart with pickles and paper towels to sell.<p>But it seems to refer to tech contracting firms who are implementing software services for WalMart. WalMart is saying they do not want their proprietary algorithms and information running on servers owned by their main competitor. That is very reasonable and sensible.

Wal-mart, with a large IT cost center, benefits from a diverse and competitive cloud infrastructure ecosystem. More at 11.

This seems more petty than anything. Though it&#x27;s strange to see just how complex Amazon has become as a company.

I don&#x27;t go to Walmart because of how they treat their employees, the nonsense they pull with their vendors, and now this.<p>The thing is that I&#x27;m not actually sure if any of the alternatives engage in this kind of practice as well.

Not product vendors. Vendors offering a service which handles Wal-Mart data.

This is a really bad tactic, even if it&#x27;s just a rumor, it&#x27;d devastating. Exerting a level of control only breeds contempt, Amazon now has free leeway to gain more partners and give more AWS credits.<p>Not to mention Walmart already has a reputation for being the bottom barrel brand, they can&#x27;t compete with Amazon on price, Amazon even has leeway to increase the value of its products and services and say &quot;we&#x27;re not Walmart&quot;.

This is how you know you&#x27;ve lost. When you are more obsessed with what your competition is doing than worrying about what you&#x27;re doing.

Huh, I feel like this story (and even moreso the comments on this post) are good reminders not to shop at Wal-Mart, at least for me.

Americans lol, want a $29 lawnmower and then turn a blind eye to the supply side of said economics.

Being aws only is probably a risky strategy for any Saas vendor anyway so at least this requirement is forcing vendors to make an investment (porting their app to gcp or azure) which would make sense anyway.

It looks like Morningstar has the same article, non-paywalled: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morningstar.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;dow-jones&#x2F;retail&#x2F;TDJNDN_201706212496&#x2F;walmart-to-vendors-get-off-amazons-cloud.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morningstar.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;dow-jones&#x2F;retail&#x2F;TDJNDN_201...</a>

Walmart finds ways for vendors, suppliers, etc to cut their costs so they can pass savings on.<p>Maybe an AWS price increase potential is a risk they dont want to take

This reminds me of when pepsi bought (Pizza hut, taco bell, KFC). Still hard to find pepsi at pizza places and they spun it off in 97&#x27;.

Non-paywalled article: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foxbusiness.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;21&#x2F;wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off-amazons-cloud.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foxbusiness.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;21&#x2F;wal-mart-to-v...</a>

strange, but true: bought a tv on amazon, came delivered in a giant sam&#x27;s club box. walmart&#x2F;sam&#x27;s club are current amazon merchants.

Everyone seems overlook one sentence:<p>&gt; they can&#x27;t run applications for the retailer<p>Wal-mart doesn&#x27;t really want it&#x27;s data on Amazon servers. Amazon is pretty aggressive about mining any available data on competitors.

So the world&#x27;s biggest capitalist economy is being reduced to two giants battling each other, after they swallow everyone else.<p>Amazon buys Comcast. The End.

eBay owning Paypal.<p>Paypal owning lots and lots of revenue data of eBay competitors.

Whoever wins (spoilers: Amazon), big business wins! Story of America.

I can&#x27;t read the article.

If libertarians don&#x27;t realize that the system they&#x27;re advocating for is essentially corporate feudalism, they&#x27;re suckers. I&#x27;d rather have a powerful government accountable to voters than a powerful corporate oligarchy that is only accountable to shareholders.

&gt; Amazon&#x27;s rise as the dominant player in renting on-demand, web-based computing power and storage has put some competitors, such as Netflix Inc., in the unlikely position of relying on a corporate rival as they move to the cloud.<p>Oh yeah, Netflix is on AWS. Amazon is doing pretty much everything, I expect&#x2F;predict in another two years they will launch a music streaming site a la Google Music&#x2F;Spotify.

I&#x27;m ok with this. I think the fear of important BI data entering a competitor&#x27;s platform is real. Yes, its a bit of a tinfoil hat, but if the cost of using a different platform like Azure or GCP is roughly the same... I&#x27;m fine with it.<p>Here&#x27;s an analogy. Let&#x27;s say Walmart rented out space on their trucks to any company that needed it. Would Amazon be crazy to tell retailers on their platform that they can&#x27;t use Walmart trucks, or they don&#x27;t want Walmart trucks driving up to their loading bays? I don&#x27;t think so. Corporate espionage is a real thing.<p>Its just a bonus that Amazon is a garbage company who deserves as little business as possible.

This is stupid! Walmart is loosing it. Generally happens when you are getting ready to lose, you start becoming erratic. Everybody forgets how WalMart single handedly destroyed the mom and pop shops of America putting them out of jobs.