Target is Moving Away from Amazon With this Move

Amazon may be a dominant player in the retail arena, but Target is planning to fight back.

The retail company is going to pull back om its use of Amazon’s Amazon Web Services say sources who are familiar with the matter.

The plans are still confidential so the sources cannot be named, but according to them, Microsoft Azure is among the rival cloud vendors vying to get Target’s cloud business.

It was just this week that Amazon finalized its purchase of organic grocery company Whole Foods and slashed the prices on many items.

While it’s hard to compete against Amazon these days, Target at least realizes it can put its money elsewhere when it comes to cloud services.

The company has plans to move e-commerce activities, mobile development and operations away from AWS through the end of the year and probably into 2018.

Wal-Mart is also trying to step back and according to a Wall Street Journal report in June, the company told its tech vendors not to run applications on Amazon’s cloud and that for its own infrastructure the company uses a combination of on-premise servers and services provided by Microsoft and others.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) nor Target Corporation (NYSE: TGT) and have not been compensated for this article.