Walmart will hire about 1,000 more people for
technology roles in India, as the world’s largest retail firm continues to
focus on technology to hold off competition such as from e-commerce giant Amazon.
Walmart has technology operations in Bengaluru
and Gurgaon and currently has about 1,800 employees. The company is looking at
expanding this headcount and driving more product ownership out of India. “One
of the things: we are doing a lot
different. We have Walmart Labs, which is e-commerce.
You have My Group which is global business
services. We are trying to be more product-oriented. We have taken whole
projects and moved them over to drive the Indian ownership of the product. We
think that is helping but this will help even more (in retaining talent),”
Walmart chief information officer Clay Johnson told.
Walmart said its technology attrition is at
industry levels and it sees normal attrition spikes around the two-year and
seven-year areas. Products such as Walmart’s return process for its 5,000 US
stores were completely developed in India. Johnson said he could not specify an
exact number of products being handled out of the country. “A lot of our
Internet-of-things work that sits in our stores. A lot of those end-to-end products are done here with the
sensors and the data are being done here,” he said.
Analysts peg Walmart’s IT spending at about $10
billion a year, making it among the world’s largest spenders of technology, and
the company counts almost every IT service provider as a client. But as
competition has ramped up from e-commerce
players such as Amazon, the retail giant is working on making sure that it gets
the most bang for its buck. IT companies have been saying that their largest
clients are rejigging their spending towards more digital offerings. Walmart’s
Johnson said the retailer to have changed how it looks at its spending.
“The way that the spend has changed is that we
are focused on how to use it to drive our competitive advantage. We don’t just
want to be the largest technology spender. We want to make sure that we are
spending it on the right technology,” Johnson said. He added that the company
was working with a slew of Indian IT services providers to co-innovate
solutions and that they had shown the ability to make changes to the way they
work.
