Whole Foods Acquisition Could Be Good News For AWS

Looks like AWS could be in for some good time! Amazon shook the world yesterday by announcing its biggest ever, $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods, the large upscale grocery store chain.

And in the process, also took away a major customer from its closest rival in cloud.

Microsoft highlighted, not too long ago, how Whole Foods uses its products and services. It is an Azure Active Directory and Office 365 customer, and uses Microsoft technologies to let its 91,000 employees sign into cloud based applications, as the case study reveals.

Whole Foods also pays for subscriptions to Office 365, which provides it access to cloud services like OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business.

And while, Amazon did not say anything about cloud in the press release the confirmed this blockbuster acquisition, there is every chance that the company will stop Whole Foods from buying more from the Azure public cloud, and instead start adopting Amazon Web Services.

Quite like how AWS has moved and integrated Zappos into its cloud platform.

For starters, AWS does provide a managed version of the Microsoft Azure Active Directory software, which means that Whole Foods could easily make the switch to that at some point while using core cloud and storage services available on Amazon Web Services.

Moving off Office 365 could be a little more problematic, but perhaps this is something that AWS is working on, as there have been hints that the cloud giant is currently developing some productivity applications of its own.

The cloud giant has already introduced services for email, file sharing, and videoconferencing.

Perhaps we’ll see AWS putting up its very own Whole Foods case study sometimes in the near future.

For now, though, Amazon has confirmed that it will let its Whole Foods function as a separate company, but there is no denying that it is just the kind of large customer that AWS needs in its quest to gain the trust of legacy enterprise customers.