Walmart Labs Acquires Two Cloud Computing Startups

In a move to help accelerate its e-commerce capabilities, retail giant Walmart (via Walmart Labs) has scooped up two cloud computing startups, platform as a service (PaaS) company OneOps and Tasty Labs, a software applications developer based in Mountain View, Calif. Financial terms of the deals have not been disclosed.

Walmart officials said the acquisitions will “significantly accelerate” the company’s PaaS and private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) strategies.

“These additions show our commitment to delivering best-in-class technology by attracting some of the best people in Silicon Valley…because we offer the unique opportunity to innovate at a massive, global scale and solve interesting challenges that improve the lives of millions of people at a time. Our journey continues, with even more wind in our sails,” Walmart’s Jeremy King wrote in a company blog post.

OneOps offers technology that is designed to automate and accelerate many processes related to environment management, application deployment and the monitoring of datacenter operations.

Meanwhile, TastyLabs was founded in 2010 by a team that includes ex-Mozillian Nick Nguyen, HousingMaps creator Paul Rademacher, and Joshua Schachter, who was best known for founding “Web 2.0’s” finest: the social bookmarking service Delicious. The company had raised $3 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and other unnamed angel investors.

TastyLabs staff will join Walmart’s product and mobile teams in an effort to build out the company’s e-commerce platform.

Walmart is the world’s largest retailer with 10,792 stores, 2.1 million employees and total annual sales of $466.1 billion worldwide, but it is far behind Amazon when it comes to online sales.

Last year, Amazon had sales of $61 billion compared to Walmart’s $9 billion anticipated sales for this year. As good as Walmart is in the retail sector, Amazon is just as good online, and that would explain why Walmart is adopting some of Amazon’s methods in providing services to its customers. The new battleground these giants are fighting for is locker space for the delivery of products.