Best Buy is the Latest Retailer to Select the AWS Cloud

Today, we’re thrilled to share that Best Buy selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider for cloud infrastructure services and its strategic partner for developing cloud engineering talent. With more than 1,000 stores and approximately 100,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada, Best Buy already runs its digital commerce business and other strategic workloads on AWS. With this new initiative to extend its cloud footprint, Best Buy will accelerate the pace of its cloud migration and implementation of its cloud-first strategy, beginning with moving additional retail operations workloads from on-premises data centers to AWS.

This new relationship with AWS signifies another step in Best Buy’s commitment to deliver outstanding customer experiences. AWS and Best Buy have a shared culture of innovation, and the retailer is known for its use of technology and analytics to better serve customers and remain agile to evolving customer needs. Using advanced cloud technologies, Best Buy was able to deploy an industry-leading curbside pickup experience in just two days at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic – a service that continues to allow customers to safely pick up technology products essential to working and learning from home.

Best Buy has also committed to hiring 1,000 new employees to its technology team and, through a collaboration with AWS, its growing teams of skilled technologists will have access to AWS Training and Certification’s comprehensive cloud training curriculum and resources. These training resources will give Best Buy’s teams new skills development opportunities and help the company achieve its goal of being one of the best companies to work for, especially for technical talent.

Accelerating Innovation in Retail

Best Buy is among thousands of retailers worldwide, like Petco, Neiman Marcus, Sainsbury’s, Instacart, and Zalando, using AWS today. An overwhelming number of retail brands choose AWS because of the breadth and depth of our service functionality, our proven operational and security expertise, pace of innovation, and because AWS has the most diverse community of partners. Gartner’s Market Share: IT Services, Worldwide 2020 report lists AWS as the retail industry’s leading cloud services provider.

AWS has a long-standing tradition of supporting retail innovation and growth. Many AWS services available today were developed to address industry-specific use cases for Amazon’s retail business. Examples of these purpose-built services include Amazon Personalize, Amazon Forecast, Amazon Connect, and Amazon Fraud Detector. Retail innovators such as Pomelo, Lotte Mart, Mercado Libre, Morrisons, MECCA, and More Retail, say they choose AWS to access these capabilities because they address retail business challenges and scale.

Retailers also choose AWS for its operational reliability at scale, refined and tested over 25 years with Amazon’s consumer businesses. For example, looking back on Prime Day 2021, Amazon CloudFront handled a peak load of over 290 million HTTP requests per minute, Amazon Aurora processed 233 billion transactions, and Amazon DynamoDB handled 89.2 million requests per second.

Growing Momentum in Retail

In addition to Best Buy, we recently announced several other exciting retail transformation stories on AWS, including:

Under Armour
This popular athletic brand selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider for SAP to increase resilience, enhance security, and provide more significant insights across its business. CTO Danny Miles called AWS “a critical element” of the company’s digital transformation strategy that enables Under Armour to deliver premium consumer experiences.

adidas AG
Markus Rautert, Senior Vice President, Technology Enablement said, “Deploying SAP environments on AWS isn’t just about transforming our technology—it’s about transforming business opportunities and using AWS’s wide range of cloud capabilities to create efficiencies and bring us closer to consumers.”

Richemont
This Swiss luxury group owns prestigious brands and businesses, including Cartier, Montblanc, IWC Schaffhausen, and Van Cleef & Arpels, and is moving its entire enterprise IT infrastructure to AWS. Chief Information Officer, Kim Hartlev, called AWS “integral” to the company’s enterprise IT transformation, commenting that AWS’s “unparalleled pace of innovation and broad portfolio of services, including analytics and machine learning” will help the company gain greater insights and become even more agile in the cloud.

Seven & i Holdings
With more than 22,600 Seven-Eleven and Ito-Yokado superstores serving more than 25 million customers on a daily basis, this Japanese retailer wanted to create retail experiences to meet shopper needs as the pandemic landscape evolves. The company selected AWS to build a common digital platform to analyze group sales data and forecast a selection of goods that best match consumer preferences in specific geographic locations.

Target Australia
The company chose AWS as its preferred cloud provider to transform its ecommerce offering and deliver a seamless consumer experience. With AWS, Target has improved the online checkout experience with real-time inventory data and a faster, more resilient ecommerce platform—while saving 90% on infrastructure costs.

Retailers that listen carefully to what customers want, unleash developers to build innovative features and functionality to meet customer needs, and constantly experiment and iterate are the retailers that will stand the test of time. There’s no other platform like AWS that allows retailers to innovate on behalf of customers. Download Transforming Retail in the Cloud: A CIO’s Handbook to learn how AWS can help you grow your business.