Walmart tech investments pay off in war against Amazon: It appears that the billions of dollars Walmart has invested in e-commerce technology and niche online retailers is paying off in its battle against Amazon. This week the retailer reported second-quarter results, saying that revenue rose 2.1 percent overall to $124.4 billion. But e-commerce revenue soared 60 percent, driven largely by organic growth through Walmart.com.
One thing Amazon has long had is a massive selection of items to buy. Walmart.com now offers 67 million SKUs; while it has a long way to go before catching up to Amazon, it has picked up the pace significantly. The retailer wants to build customer loyalty through continuous digital transformation, CEO Douglas McMillon said on a conference call:
Our strategy is to make every day easier for busy families. To accomplish this, we continue our transformation to become more of a digital enterprise that moves with speed and agility. I’m encouraged by innovation in the business. We’re testing associate delivery of walmart.com orders in a few stores and by the end of the year, we’ll have approximately 100 automated pickup towers in stores across the U.S., where customers can pick up their orders within a matter of minutes.
With Easy Reorder on walmart.com, a customer has visibility to their past in-store and online purchases. In a matter of seconds, they can easily repurchase the items they’ve bought most frequently before and save the time it may have taken to make a weekly shopping list.
One challenge Walmart is trying to address is the matter of attracting more upscale shoppers. It's done so with the acquisition of primarily online boutique retailers such as Moosejaw, Shoebuy and Bonobos. These companies have given Walmart "critical category expertise" in higher-margin shoes and apparel, McMillon said.
POV: Walmart also cited growth in store visits, a key goal of its e-commerce program. Many customers who come in to pick up online orders stick around to shop for other items, thereby driving more revenue. While profits were down in the quarter, that's a reflection of the ongoing investments Walmart is making in the business. One challenge it still faces with those niche acquisitions—and more are rumored to be on the way—is to preserve their brands' image and customer base, which may be turned off by an association with Walmart.
New NVIDIA virtualization software delivers, democratizes HPC: NVIDIA has introduced Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation Software, aka Quadro vDWS, which can deliver HPC (high performance computing) capabilities across enterprises in a much more flexible manner than before. Here's how NVIDIA describes the value proposition:
Quadro vDWS enables greater mobility and collaboration among globally dispersed teams. It also addresses the increasingly compute-intensive workflows -- with their exponential growth in data size and complexity -- associated with new technologies for 3D, photorealistic rendering, virtual reality and deep learning. These are particularly common in such fields as engineering and science, where, for example, simulations are conducted during the design process to accurately predict final products.
"The enterprise is transforming. Workflows are evolving to incorporate AI, photorealism, VR, and greater collaboration among employees. The Quadro visualization platform is evolving with the enterprise to provide the performance required," said Bob Pette, Vice President of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. "With Quadro vDWS on Tesla-powered servers, businesses can tackle larger datasets, power the most demanding applications and meet the need for greater mobility."
The software is available for more than 120 systems from 33 vendors and runs in a browser.
POV: GPUs are rapidly becoming a favorite The Tesla GPUs provide up to twice the graphics performance of previous-generation GPUs, and high-end versions contain a whopping 24GB of RAM. Here's where Quadro vDWS can make a real difference: Not every user may need the full power of a Tesla GPU, and some may need only a small fraction. Quadro vDWS coupled with Tesla GPUs make it possible to slice and dice its computer power and serve it up as needed to multiple users, working on multiple types of devices, in multiple locations. The economic and operational benefits of this are pretty clear; it's a long way from the days when a workstation meant a large, expensive computer tied down to a desktop.
NVIDIA sees a major opportunity in orienting its GPUs around deep learning. GPUs are well-suited for deep learning jobs due to their architecture, which is geared toward massively parallel processing. It has an early lead over competitors such as AMD in the deep learning market, not only with respect to the GPUs themselves but the many libraries and frameworks it has developed for deep learning workloads. The company is on a mission to train 100,000 developers this year on a variety of related technologies through its Deep Learning Institute.
Legacy watch: Michigan's mainframe migration project from Hell: Like many public-sector organizations, Michigan's Secretary of State is still running critical processes on a mainframe system that dates back to the 1960s.
The state wants to move off the mainframe rather badly. However, it's been trying without success since 2008, when it signed a deal with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise—which is now known as DXC Technology following its merger with CSC—on a $49 million contract, as MLive.com reports.
Michigan and HP agreed on a 2010 deadline to deliver a new version of the state's Customer and Automotive Records System, but HP didn't meet it. The state, which paid the contractor $33 million, ended up filing a lawsuit against HP in 2015.
In the end, Michigan received a $13 million settlement, but still had no new system. Now it has hired a new contractor, FAST Enterprises, to restart the project. It is now expected to be completed over the next five years, meaning the project from start to finish could take up to 14 years—and that's assuming the new deadline is met. It's not clear how much more money has been budgeted for the contract with FAST Enterprises.
POV: The five-year timeline granted to FAST raises a few questions. It could merely be a reflection that the project plan with HP was unrealistically short in length. However, the more likely case may be that the project's requirements have to be rewritten, given how old the original plan already is. In any event, this is yet another case of wasted money and missed opportunities, to the taxpaying public's detriment.