With the blockbuster news that #Amazon is paying $13.7 billion to purchase #WholeFoods, the e-commerce giant will get another piece of the grocery market and a bigger brick-and-mortar presence, providing the deal passes regulatory muster. But thinking outside the box, Whole Foods could potentially end up as a new captive market for tech services offered by Amazon's cloud computing arm: #AmazonWebServices. Getting food products to and from 465 retail locations across North America and the U.K. poses a logistical problem that AWS tools can help solve. To be fair, this wouldn't be totally new business to AWS. Whole Foods is already allied with grocery delivery service Instacart, itself an AWS customer. (Instacart also competes with Amazon's own grocery delivery service.) And, Whole Foods also uses business software from Infor to manage its retail operations. Infor also runs on AWS data centers. And, as pointed out by CNBC, Whole Foods also uses some services from AWS competitor Microsoft (MSFT, +0.14%) Azure, according to a Microsoft case study. Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter. Amazon—which started out as an online bookseller but has expanded to selling everything from video to appliances to fresh groceries from its website—has also pushed into the brick and mortar space with its own physical bookstores. Along the way, Amazon built a prodigious IT business, running out of a worldwide network of data centers. Customers can run their databases, their inventory systems, and even their email—all software that they used to run in-house—on AWS. Amazon is also working on an array of logistics technology, including cashierless pay stations for its Amazon Go concept stores and delivery drones, which could find application at Whole Foods. And don't forget the fleet of delivery trucks and planes, Amazon already runs.
http://fortune.com/2017/06/16/amazon-buying-whole-foods-cloud/
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