Amazon’s $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods Friday also took a major customer away from its closest rival in the cloud.
Whole Foods is a Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Office365 customer, as noted by CNBC. And while it will likely take years before anything major changes — it looks like Amazon is going to operate Whole Foods independently, like it has with other major acquisitions like Zappos and Twitch — at some point it will be hard for the Whole Foods tech group to ignore the value of its parent company’s services.
In any event, Amazon Web Services already hosts a lot of Whole Foods technology through the grocer’s partnership with Infor, a software-as-a-service company that is helping Whole Foods replace 12 separate and different legacy systems with one cloud-based system. Infor runs that new system on AWS, the market leader for public cloud infrastructure computing, and given that Whole Foods is still in the process of making the multiyear transition to the Infor application it could be a while before it shifts gears.
AWS provides a version of Active Directory for its customers, but Amazon Workdocs is not exactly on the same level as Office365 when it comes to adoption. That might be why the company was so annoyed when Gene Farrell left to go to Smartsheet: it seems like AWS is working on an upgrade to its workplace collaboration technology.
