Walmart and Microsoft are all set to knock down rival Amazon with their new 5-year strategic alliance, in both technology and retail. Amazon’s U.S. e-commerce market share currently stands at around 49 percent.

@Walmart takes its eggs out of @AWS basket – https://t.co/vbe8U79DBH via @TFiR_io

— TFiR (@tfir_io) July 19, 2018

Why it matters: As a direct competitor to Amazon’s online retail business, Walmart is not comfortable putting its eggs in AWS basket. Historically, Amazon is not known for playing nice with its competitors and Walmart probably wants to avoid a situation where it’s core business is at the mercy of Amazon.

In a five-year agreement, Walmart has selected the full range of Microsoft cloud solutions, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 for enterprise-wide use to help standardize across the company’s family of brands.

Walmart is already using Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads and is now embarking on a broad set of cloud innovation projects that leverage Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications.

As part of the partnership, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on the assessment, development, and support phase of moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud native architectures.