Across the corner from YouTube in San Bruno, California, Walmart techies work on the $219 billion (market cap) company's more forward-looking technology in mobile apps, cloud computing and integrations for new services like Walmart Pay.
Walmart's been in Silicon Valley for fifteen years, but only started talking about it five years ago, says Jeremy King, CTO and head of WalmartLabs, who's led the effort for all but six months of the more public phase. King's team has absorbed 15 acquisitions and over time helped Walmart build an ecommerce back-end that supports annual sales of nearly $14 billion annually, but King says that Walmart still prefers the up-sell when shoppers come into its physical stores, as seen through its British Asda business: "About 40% of people who buy online and come pick up, they'll go into the store and buy more when they're there."
The push to brick-and-mortar stores might feel low-tech. But in a conversation at the Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay on Monday, King surprised the assembled executives and investors with one statistic that Silicon Valley wouldn't expect of the giant retailer. When Walmart Labs competes with top tech companies for talent, it gets the job candidate as much as 70% of the time, King says.
The reason for Walmart Labs' talent draw, its leader argues, is that developers and engineers who work for the group get to test what they build at a scale few startups ever reach. "When we pilot something, we can just go to 50 stores," King says. One recent example is Walmart Pay, which the company plans to continue to roll out nationally over upcoming months. The product team under King is working on adding new features over time to integrate e-receipts and return capabilities for the app over time. "It's almost so fast that people are confused right now, and it takes two or three times to get used to it," King said.
Walmart's other big draw is OneOps, its open source cloud management project it made available in January. While some industry insiders saw the effort as a shot at Amazon, which operates the leading cloud services company in Amazon Web Services, King says Walmart was more interested in working with a bunch of cloud providers and not getting locked in with any single one. "It was for our use, and it helps attract developers who want to work with us," King says. The executive said that with availability only at a few weeks so far, no companies have deployed OneOps yet, but a number of CTOs have expressed interest.
The benefit of using cloud capabilities (Walmart connects to Microsoft Azure and others) is also more flexibility handling the traditional massive increases in traffic during the holiday season. "We used to have product freezes in November because we were scared of Black Friday," King told Forbes managing editor Bruce Upbin. "But this past year we had 30,000 deployments in November alone."
Walmart Labs' ongoing burden is to change Silicon Valley's assumptions about Walmart and technology. Its more mainstream American mindset, however, might give it an advantage.
King drew major laughter from the crowd of CIOs and founders when he shared a joke he'd heard about Bay Area tech hype: "A data scientist is a statistician who lives in Silicon Valley."
