Walmart will open-source OneOps cloud platform
Walmart is making its OneOps cloud platform open source in a bid to keep up with its main competitor Amazon. The US retailer has experienced financial disappointment in recent years as modern, predominantly digital, businesses eat away at its market share. Its chief financial officer Charles Holley recently warned that revenue is unlikely to grow until 2019.
Walmart clearly believes that it must modernize in order to stay afloat, hence the news that it will be releasing the source code for its OneOps cloud platform on GitHub before the end of the year. In doing so, the retailer is offering developers an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS) where they are not tied into long term contracts and compatible technologies.
Jeremy King, CTO of Walmart Global eCommerce and head of WalmartLabs believes that the open source approach will give developers and businesses more freedom.
"We’re enabling any organization to achieve the same cloud portability and developer benefits that Walmart has enjoyed", he said. "And by eliminating the barriers that cloud hosting providers have erected, OneOps will drive them to compete based on price, customer service and innovation. It’s a winning scenario for all dev-centric organizations".
King adds that as an open source platform, OneOps encapsulates one of the key tenets of cloud computing: flexibility. In addition, Walmart is keen to stress the other benefits of its cloud offering, including its portability, continuous lifecycle management, faster innovation and greater abstraction of cloud environments.
However, AWS is unlikely to be overly concerned by Walmart’s decision to release its cloud source code. As one of the market leaders, it supplies services to thousands of businesses and recently announced quarterly revenue figures in excess of $7 billion.
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