Dive Brief:

• Wal-Mart is capitalizing on "innersource" to enhance IT innovation companywide, according to a CIO report.
• Innersource, the concept of sharing firewall-protected open source software internally, is helping IT teams within Wal-Mart move more quickly because they don’t have to start new IT projects from scratch.
• Innersource has also been used at companies including Autodesk, Capital One, Paypal and Bloomberg, according to CIO.

Dive Insight:

Walmart has been an open source fan for a while.

Last fall, the company said it would open source the cloud technology it built following its acquisition of startup OneOps, making it freely available to anyone. Because OneOps is designed to help users manage critical application workloads on any cloud-based infrastructure, companies that use it have the ability to "move applications, databases or entire cloud environments from one cloud provider to another so as to take advantage of better offers."

Innersource, which it runs through GitHub Enterprise, is the next step for Wal-Mart.

"The more we can do this internal open source, the more flexible we can be and the faster we can release code to customers," said Jeremy King, CTO of Wal-Mart Global eCommerce and head of @WalmartLabs, in an interview with CIO. "We want you to consume OS because it’s faster, cheaper and better but we want you to contribute because it’s the right thing to do for the community."

King says an added benefit to the company’s open source strategy is that its attracting a bevy of fresh tech talent.