How Walmart leveraged open source to build the infrastructure for the world’s second largest online e-commerce site.
Jono Bacon, on right, chats with WalmartLabs’ Jeremy King in a “fireside chat” at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Photo courtesy All Things Open.
What do you do when your e-commerce site adds at least a million new products every month, and sometimes more than a million in a single week? According to Jeremy King, who is senior vice president and CTO for Walmart Global eCommerce, one of the things you do is invest in open source, both as a user and as a developer. But how do you convince the suits in the front office to release code developed in house as open source?
“The good part about WalmartLabs is that we sort of didn’t ask for permission,” he admitted last week before a crowd of over 2,000 at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was being interviewed on stage by ATO’s master of ceremonies, community manager Jono Bacon, in a “fireside chat” during the opening day keynote sessions. “We sort of started off with that approach. As we got bigger, obviously you don’t open source a product that you’ve spent resources on for a couple of years without really talking to the enterprise, so it really was a baby step as you go in.”
King has been with Walmart since 2011, a relationship that began with a phone call from a recruiter who told him he was representing a large company that had “underinvested in technology on the e-commerce side for a long time” but which had a policy of using “technology to lower costs of goods so we could give that back in price to our consumers.”