Walmart's bet on cloud computing starts to give return

One of the best chances of Walmart reach Amazon.com in e-commerce are the six giant farms (also called mega Server clouds) of the company, each larger than 10 football fields. These facilities, which cost millions of dollars to Walmart and took nearly five years to be built, are beginning to pay off. The online retailer's sales have had a strong performance in the last three consecutive quarters, outpacing industry growth levels. This performance is being driven by thousands of own servers that allow the company to process a high volume of customer data internally. Most retailers rent computing power they need to store and manage this information. Walmart's decision to build your own infrastructure shows your determination to get a large share of online purchases, in part by imitating Amazon's use of big data technology to boost digital sales. The effort is helping Walmart to stay competitive with Amazon prices and tightly control the main activities of the company, as the stocks. "It made a big difference to how quickly we can expand our e-commerce business," said Tim Kimmet, Director of operations in the cloud to Walmart. Kimmet said Walmart, for example, is using data in the cloud to store items often ordered by customers through purchase voice devices such as Google Home. The network is helping the retailer to improve its operations in physical stores, too. Using data obtained from millions of transactions, the company accelerated the process by which customers can return online purchases in their stores in 60%. Walmart can still adjust the prices in their physical locations almost instantly in entire regions. "Now we are able to perform changes faster," said Jeremy King, Chief Technology Officer of Walmart. He added that Walmart can now make more than 170,000 monthly changes in software that support your website, compared with less than 100 changes previously. Walmart, the largest retailer of the world, holds a participation of only 3.6% in u.s. e-commerce market, compared with 43.5% of the Amazon, according to digital research firm eMarketer. Still, the effort in cloud computing from Walmart is significant at a time when u.s. retailers is undergoing a huge break and the data-based decision-making has become more important than ever to understand how buyers make purchases . Walmart's online revenue grew 50% over the previous year during the third quarter, helping the company disclose quarterly growth stronger since 2009. Walmart's decision to build a network that does not rely on a single provider of cloud technology has transformed your ability to understand consumers, who now move between the store, computers, mobile devices and applications for shopping. Kimmet, Walmart, said that security was another big factor behind the effort, allowing the company to better protect customer data. This concern with secrecy extends to his six "mega clouds" or giant server farms and 75 "micro" clouds, whose sites the company does not disclose publicly.