Dive Brief:

• Whole Foods Market, which Amazon announced it would buy for $13.7 billion Friday, currently uses Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, according to CNBC, citing a case study on Microsoft's website.
• Whole Foods also pays for Office 365 subscriptions, which provides Whole Foods employees access to cloud services like OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business, according to the case study.
• Whole Foods started using Microsoft Azure to let its 91,000 employees easily access cloud-based applications, the case study reports.

Dive Insight:

Whole Foods will likely not stay on Microsoft infrastructure for long, so at some point the natural foods retailer will face a significant migration.

This is a big issue with mergers and acquisitions, where the purchasing company runs on a different IT infrastructure than the company it’s buying. This creates a duplication of processes, such as storage, as well as incompatible systems. Businesses must then migrate to one infrastructure or potentially end up paying twice for similar services. It’s a matter of reviewing and streamlining, and it isn’t cheap or easy.

But because Whole Foods was acquired by the dominant cloud company, the transition will likely be more seamless than what it is for other companies. AWS has made a name for itself with the ease of transition storage to a virtual environment.

The chain of grocery stores should pose no greater challenge than its other customers, particularly because Whole Foods doesn't have to migrate as much sensitive data as a healthcare company or a financial services firm might have.