Michael Seto/Business Insider
- Nine months after being swallowed by Amazon, Whole Foods is moving its information technology systems into Amazon's cloud, Amazon Web Services.
- A source with knowledge of the situation tells us it's slow going.
- The initial plan is to simply move its existing systems into Amazon's cloud and not immediately dump all it vendors for Amazon versions of its technology.
- It is also hoping to move its most important system to the cloud, its point of sale (POS) system, and this is giving it headaches, a source said.
It's been nine months since Amazon closed on its deal to acquire Whole Foods. The grocery chain is just now starting to move the information technology systems that power its registers, scanners, and other store devices into Amazon's cloud, Amazon Web Services.
A source with knowledge of the situation tells us that the process is slow going.
Whole Foods is proceeding cautiously and is currently focusing on its most important - albeit chronically troubled - IT system: its point-of-sale (POS) system, according to an internal memo detailing the process.
Whole Foods is currently working on a small-scale proof of concept to move its POS systems to Amazon's cloud. Meaning that, for now, it's taking the technology Whole Foods already uses - including its POS systems - and putting them in the cloud.
Whole Foods will be testing to ensure the cloud-hosted POS system will function efficiently with the connectivity needed for an Amazon data center before it goes full-hog into AWS.
A source with knowledge of the process said the POS system is in dire need of an upgrade. They described a system that has been plagued by critical failures, such as registers not adding sales taxes or failing to process credit cards.
"Just in the past month and a half there have been more critical failures than I have seen since it was rolled out a few years ago," this person said.
At the same, Whole Foods is working to slowly move more of its IT onto AWS.
In 2017, Whole Food's Jason Buechel publicly discussed how the grocery story finished a three-year ordeal where it upgraded 90% of the IT systems it used.
For now, the store is simply moving the tech it already uses into AWS and will run it all from AWS. It is doing this instead of ditching that software and using Amazon's own in-house developed technology.
However, a job ad posted by Whole Foods promises that the grocery chain has ambitious plans to use AWS and likely some of the many technologies AWS offers that were developed to service its own massive ecommerce
The ad says (emphasis ours):
"Whole Foods Market is rapidly transforming our foundational technology footprint and applying a cloud-first strategy starting with AWS. You will be responsible for managing multiple and concurrent projects of varying scale and complexity as WFM migrates technology and applications to AWS, enhances our network, updates our data-centers, and rearchitects our many applications."
It will be interesting to see if Whole Foods can indeed become a poster child for retail transformation by moving to AWS's cloud. It's common knowledge that most retailers avoid doing business with AWS. AWS is Amazon's most profitable unit by a mile and retailers aren't interested in contributing to their largest and most dangerous competitor's bottom line.
Whole Foods and Amazon declined comment.
In the job post, Whole Foods says it is looking for someone with no less than "a super-hero-esque breadth of program management expertise and skills" who will "drive a transformational program."
In other words, the job of recreating Whole Foods in Amazon's image is also going to be a big and challenging job, not suitable for mere mortals.
Here's a partial bit of the job description:
