Washington, Jul 17 (IANS): Aiming to make shopping faster and easier for millions of customers, cash-and-carry major Walmart on Tuesday announced a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft.

Already using Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads, Walmart will now embark on a broad set of Cloud innovation projects that leverage Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications.

"Walmart's commitment to technology is centred around creating incredibly convenient ways for customers to shop and empowering associates to do their best work," Doug McMillon, CEO, Walmart, said in a statement.

"Whether it's combined with our agile cloud platform or leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to work smarter, we believe Microsoft will be a strong partner in driving our ability to innovate further," McMillon added.

Walmart has selected full range of Microsoft Cloud solutions, including Azure and Microsoft 365, for enterprise-wide use to help standardise across the company's family of brands.

"The world's leading companies run on our Cloud, and I'm thrilled to partner with Walmart to accelerate their digital transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Under the partnership, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on the assessment, development and support phase of moving hundreds of existing applications to Cloud native architectures.

To grow and enhance the online experience, the company will migrate a significant portion of walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, including its Cloud-powered check-out, thus, enabling Walmart to grow and reach more global markets than before.