As Walmart Global Tech kicks its recruiting machine into overdrive to add 5,000 new tech experts this year and push its total workforce to 25,000, are the world’s leading cloud vendors fully prepared to deal with a new generation of customers whose technological sophistication and needs are wildly different than just 2 or 3 years ago?
“Global Tech is the fastest-growing corporate team at Walmart and our technologists have a legacy of game-changing innovations,” wrote CTO and executive VP Suresh Kumar in a blog post last week on Walmart.com.
Now, I surely understand that not every company has Walmart’s resources, and that not every company will have tens of thousands of highly sophisticated data experts and developers on its internal team.
But it would be utterly foolish to ignore how Walmart’s example, though a bit extreme, is representative of the stunningly fast evolution of mainstream corporations into tech-savvy and software-centric organizations.
And as those businesses add significant chunks of internal firepower, then surely their expectations and demands of what their tech vendors should be delivering will change dramatically as well.
So, my question is a simple one:
Are the companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10—the world’s largest and most-influential cloud providers—aware of these very different and new customer profiles? Are the cloud vendors changing what they make and how they engage to map to this new reality?
Here are a few supporting points from the blog post by Kumar:
- “Today, Walmart Global Tech develops and manages the foundational technologies on which customer experiences are built, including cloud, data, enterprise architecture, DevOps, infrastructure and security.”
- “This year, we’re focused on hiring cybersecurity professionals, architects, developers, software engineers, data scientists, data engineers, technical program managers and product managers. Our growth includes entering new locations and expanding our presence in communities we call home.”
- tech categories in which Walmart Global Tech had the highest growth rate for new hires in 2021: Data Engineering, 85%; Data Science, 45%; Software Engineering, 31%.
- “With the addition of Atlanta and Toronto, Walmart Global Tech now has 17 hubs that span from Silicon Valley and Northwest Arkansas to Dallas and India. Our growth includes continuing to build teams in two locations we entered last year: Seattle, Washington and Chennai, India.”
I doubt very much that the “Tech IQ” represented by some of these statistics and in the perspectives offered by Kumar align with the sales profiles among the major cloud vendors. And while, again, Walmart Global Tech is certainly an outlier, we have all learned over the past 24 months that what appeared to be impossible of unfathomable can very quickly become the norm.
So, Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors, give it a think: are you fully prepared to engage with these new types of customers with extreme relevance, context, and capability?
For more on my perspectives of this on-going competition, see my post: Cloud Wars Minute: Walmart Shakes Up Cloud Industry as a Deep Tech Corporate Customer
