With Whole Foods purchase Amazon is now a Microsoft Azure customer

While Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion was rather big news last week, it did not seem to have much relevance to our Microsoft focussed readers.

It turns our however that the deal has turned the two largest cloud competitors into partners of sorts.

According to a case study on Microsoft’s website, Whole Foods is a major cloud customer of Microsoft, providing Azure Active Directory to 91,000 of their employees to allow staff to easily sign into cloud-based applications.

Microsoft also offers Office 365 subscriptions to the company, providing access to OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business and more.

The news underlines the disparity between Microsoft and Amazon’s cloud strengths, with Amazon most highly skilled in raw cloud computing services, while Microsoft’s strength is in delivering their traditional on-premise back-end services from the cloud.

It is not known yet if Amazon intends to convert Whole Foods to a non-Microsoft shop, but with Amazon’s enterprise services still somewhat lacking I suspect Amazon will be relying on Microsoft’s delivery for a while still.