Walmart Makes It Easier To Switch Clouds With OneOps

Walmart has open sourced the OneOps software that the company acquired as part of its purchase of the eponymous company OneOps in 2013.

Walmart purchased OneOps as part of its move to convert its own eCommerce software from a monolithic application “deployed once every two months” into a “best-in-class global e-commerce platform.”

Walmart says the software will help developers to write applications that can work in different clouds with ease, which was part of the offering from OneOps when it was a private startup company.

“This means they can test and switch between different cloud providers to take advantage of better pricing, technology, and scalability – without being locked in to one cloud provider,” the company said in a statement posted on the walmartlabs.com website.

In what looks like a subtle dig at rival Amazon.com, Walmart justifies releasing OneOps as open source software because “Walmart is a cloud user, not a cloud provider. It makes sense for Walmart to release OneOps as an open source project so that the community can improve or build ways for it to adapt to existing technology.”

But does it?

Walmart is no stranger to using technology to assist with selling a large volume and variety of goods to many buyers. Like any large retail chain, data plays an important part in running the business profitably, as Target recently learned at great cost. The logistical challenges of ensuring that stock arrives in the right place at the right time is just one of thousands of problems that requires modern technology to address.

However Walmart is not the font of all knowledge and new development. OpenStack, on which much of Walmart's eCommerce system is based, did not spring forth from Walmart. Walmart has people smart enough to know that the great strides in new IT systems are likely to happen outside the company, not solely within it.

Walmart is also, by its own admission, more of a user of these systems than a provider. If Walmart believed the OneOps technology gave it a competitive advantage, why share that advantage with others? There doesn't appear to be a compelling reason for Walmart to keep the software an internal secret.

But that isn't the same as a reason to release the software. Releasing it, and managing the ecosystem around it, will cost money to do, so Walmart must see some advantage; the company is hardly known as an altruistic organisation.

What if Walmart could promote competition for cloud resources? That will surely hurt Amazon more than Walmart. And look at the list of supported clouds. Microsoft Azure is listed, supported by Azure, yet while Amazon Web Services is listed as supported, it is supported by… @WalmartLabs.

Microsoft believes (not without cause) that they have a stronger case.

This looks to me like another shot in the ongoing war of attrition fought between the major public cloud vendors, and Walmart as a customer stands to benefit–through lower prices–no matter who wins.

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.