Today, Microsoft has announced that it is forming a strategic partnership with Walmart, providing the retail corporation a range of its cloud solutions to make shopping an easier process for customers all over the world. The five-year agreement pits leading e-commerce company Amazon against two of its closest competitors in retail and cloud computing. Although Walmart already uses Microsoft services for critical applications, it will now be taking on several cloud innovation projects for external services, as well as internal applications. The expanding use of cloud technology is aimed at improving three key areas for Walmart, namely: As part of the collaboration, hundreds of existing applications will be moved to cloud-native architectures like Azure. Furthermore, Microsoft will be helping the multinational retail corporation innovate its services in a variety of ways, primarily to make things easier for customers. Walmart will also be conducting a phased rollout of Microsoft 365 services to its employees.