Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) is seeking to break the dominance that Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has over the cloud computing business.
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Wal-Mart has open sourced its cloud management tool called OneOps to allow the creation and migration of applications across different computing infrastructures such as Azure from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), Rackspace and Amazon.
Wal-Mart’s venture with OneOps will therefore not be directly competing against its Amazonian rival but rather enhancing portability across different platforms. Amazon hosts numerous firms on its cloud infrastructure. These companies depend entirely on Amazon’s infrastructure since there is no portability to other platforms. It is also one of the reasons why technology infrastructure has been Amazon’s main sources of revenue.
Wal-Mart’s new venture not only aims to improve the situation for these companies but also to enhance the ease of data use. This is because its software will allow companies to access Amazon’s cloud business while at the same time using their own data centers. In this way they will not be confined to Amazon data services. This is good news for enterprises and developers because it will provide advantages such as scalability, technology, and better pricing.
Developers will be able to program applications that can easily interact with different clouds thanks to OneOps. Additionally, Wal-Mart is launching OneOps as an open source software because it is not a cloud provider but rather a cloud user. Releasing it will allow the cloud industry to create new ways that will enable it to blend in with existing technology.
According to Wal-Mart Labs CTO Jeremy King, the primary drive behind the company purchasing OneOps in 2013 was to overcome the limitations of the current system where firms are locked in Amazon’s cloud service. Wal-Mart believes that the open source OneOps will allow the creation of more tools and functionalities that will be essential for the support of future technologies. This may also attract more companies that depend on cloud technology while at the same time making it easier for them to adopt the technology in the first place.
