Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Best Buy Co., Inc. (NASDAQ: BBY) has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider for cloud infrastructure services and its strategic partner for developing cloud engineering talent. This collaboration will help Best Buy further apply cloud technology across its retail operations and support the rapid innovation of its customer experiences and the work of its teams to create world-class digital experiences that can enrich the lives of millions.
“Our purpose to enrich lives through technology has never been more important, and this new partnership with AWS is another step in our commitment to deliver outstanding experiences for our customers,” said Brian Tilzer, Chief Digital and Technology Officer of Best Buy Co., Inc. “Not only will AWS’s cloud technologies help us in this work, but in combination with our culture of innovation and reinvention, they will give our teams invaluable development opportunities as we continue to grow our skilled teams and remain one of the best places for amazing technology talent to thrive.”
Best Buy—recently named one of Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators—is known for its culture of innovation and use of technology and analytics to better serve customers, including responding with significant flexibility to external challenges. For example, using advanced cloud technologies, part of which were already supported by AWS, Best Buy was able to deploy an industry-leading curbside pickup experience in just two days at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost two years later, this service continues to allow customers to safely pick up technology products essential to working and learning from home.
Using the breadth and depth of AWS Cloud capabilities, Best Buy’s product teams and engineers continue to transform the way people buy technology. By applying AWS compute, storage, database, and security services, Best Buy creates new experiences for its customers, including the ability to interact virtually with experts to receive live demos of physical products. Combining AWS’s advanced cloud technologies with Best Buy’s company-wide agile development model fuels new offerings such as Best Buy’s Totaltech program. Totaltech provides members with access to 24×7 tech expertise delivered via an AWS-powered chatbot and a heightened sense of confidence that their tech support needs can be resolved quickly.
“Best Buy is transforming the way people buy technology and is using AWS’s comprehensive set of cloud services to accelerate its innovation. Thousands of retailers like Best Buy continue to trust AWS as their cloud provider of choice because of our ability to help them remain agile and innovate faster to meet the demands of the constantly evolving retail landscape,” said Werner Vogels, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com, Inc. “Our shared culture of customer obsession and innovation will help us work together to ensure that the cloud will benefit every customer across every aspect of their business.”
Through this strategic collaboration with AWS, Best Buy will also 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. Moving forward, Best Buy will expand its use of AWS capabilities and AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS, to increase resilience, gain agility, and accelerate innovation.
In addition, the collaboration will give Best Buy’s growing teams of skilled technologists access to AWS Training and Certification’s comprehensive cloud training curriculum and resources. These training resources will give Best Buy teams new skills development opportunities and help Best Buy achieve its goal of being one of the best companies to work for, especially for technical talent. Best Buy has committed to hiring 1,000 new employees to its technology team—with 30% of them being diverse, specifically Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and women—and has growing tech and data science hubs in Atlanta, Boston, Seattle, and Minneapolis.
