How Walmart Says It Is Quietly Winning At Tech

It doesn’t matter what a retailer sells; if it doesn’t have the IT muscle behind the scenes to power the millions of microscopic transactions that comprise getting a product to a shelf, it’ll fall flat with consumers eventually. Even Walmart, the jack of all trades of in-store retail, knows that it can’t rest on its laurels as a dominant pre-digital revolution merchant.

That’s why Walmart CTO and Head of WalmartLabs Jeremy King has been bullish to anybody that would listen at Forbes‘ CIO Summit on his company’s IT chops. Key to this renaissance in outreach to the best and brightest (and most newly employable) minds, King told Forbes, are the opportunities that working at Walmart presents over that of a startup. While the latter could fold before tech graduates get to do anything exciting, Walmart already has the resources and scope to perform like a cutting-edge startup without any of the risks or worry about valuations.

“When we pilot something, we can just go to 50 stores,” King said, pointing to Walmart’s rapid rollout of Walmart Pay over the past several months and the company’s plans to continue testing expansions in the months to come.

King also trumpeted the horn of OneOps, Walmart’s relatively new open-source cloud management program that some observers saw as a move to, one day, rival Amazon’s ever-growing Web services division. At the moment, though, OneOps is just another indication from Walmart that it’s pivoting toward the future of retail and that it wants and needs the right employees to keep an internal crucible of innovation churning.

So far, this committment to supercharging its IT capabilities has paid off for Asda, a U.K. subsidiary.

“About 40 percent of people who buy online and come pick up, they’ll go into the [Asda] store and buy more when they’re there,” King told Forbes.

Now, Walmart just has to get consumers to do the same thing at its principally branded stores.