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Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

chargedretail.co.uk

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Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#91

Post by oneplane »

luckylion wrote: post #52
fsloth wrote: post #18

Europe, especially Germany, has this general consensus that EU needs it's inhouse large cloud providers. So think about state subsidies, preferring european partners and stuff like that. With enough capital and will they will get to somewhere. You can be sure the political establishment likely has their back.

And Lidl/Schwarz especially has a strict No-Amazon-Policy. They see Amazon as a competitor, so if you want to work with them on a corporate level, you must not use AWS to process or store anything relating to their business. They do make exceptions, but you better be prepared to make a hell of a case for your product for them to reach up to upper management and ask for an exception to buy your services. And it makes…

I still think it's weird that companies think this helps anything. AWS isn't the same as the Amazon shop. Yes it shares the name and if you go enough levels above management you end up with Bezos but other than that their computers != their shop.

Sometimes people then point to the fact that it's still a US company but ironically people try to make that point on their US-created computers using websites on a US-owned gTLD with US-owned software. Generic cloud resources seem like the smallest issue to me in that chain.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#92

Post by Reason077 »

runj__ wrote: post #5

In Sweden Lidl is know for being suspiciously cheap, they're even playing on it in their ads here. They had a marketing stunt where a chef started a luxury pop-up restaurant and the payoff was that it was all Lidl ingredients. "You can cook good food EVEN though you're using Lidl stuff" I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.

> ”being suspiciously cheap ... I'm not 100% sure that's what I want of a cloud provider.”

Just like in the supermarket industry, there is plenty of demand in the market for quality products at cheaper prices.

I remember the early days of AWS where they would surprise us with price cuts every 6-12 months. That hasn’t happened for a long time, which suggests to me that AWS is, over time, taking advantage of their dominant position and getting more greedy with pricing. Just like Amazon itself!

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#93

Post by dna_polymerase »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #73
bflesch wrote: post #60

I've been to LIDL / Schwarz Group headquarters in Heilbronn last year, and while they're a super young company with a vibrant atmosphere (which quite unique amongst large German companies), IMO they are ultimately too much attached to their legacy cash cows. They are not streamlining retail processes because they earn too much money with it. They have great IT talent, which is building fancy pilots all day, but refus…

I've only been to Lidls in the US, but their stores seem pretty streamlined to me.

In Germany, their store managers do inventory manually, which means they have to order items they run low on, no tech insight. Their attempt at setting up SAP failed after burning 500 million on it.

Delivery robots, Amazon-style prototypes for cashier-less systems, heck, even Instacart like delivery are nowhere to be found. If Amazon decided to enter the German supermarket landscape, Lidl (also, Aldi and others) would be in serious trouble.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#94

Post by estsauver »

markvdb wrote: post #77
estsauver wrote: post #8

I'm really confused why they think european data protection laws are likely to be a big barrier. I think Amazon is well poised to let you choose regions for things, and unless LIDL knows something we don't, will probably be able to adapt to almost any new regulations as well or as fast as Lidl could. I also wonder why I would trust LIDL to execute on a vital part of infrastructure for us, when they can't manage an SA…

I rather see them cancelling SAP as a positive sign. They seem to know what they are doing...

They cancelled their SAP integration after dropping 500 million euros...

It might be a sign they're moving in the right direction, but it also tells me they are transitioning from a board and executive team that felt that was the right path quite recently.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#95

Post by Semaphor »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #16

I'm currently getting a 500 on the link. Here's [1] an alternative source, originally in German but put through Google Translate. There's three things to note there: it's not Lidl itself, but the parent company doing this, and the plans were announced late last year. Also they're building out the infrastructure for internal use first and are not necessarily looking to offer a cloud to customers, though they may work…

It’s German, but here is the Heilbronner Stimme [0] article the Handlesblatt references. It says Schwarz Gruppe bought 90% of Camico IT, but they’ll keep the name and 50% of their work will be what they did before.

[0]: https://www.stimme.de/heilbronn/wirtschaft/2018/schwarz-grup...

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#96

Post by benjohnson1707 »

Former Schwarz employee here:

The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) .

The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.

The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'.

They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.

Interesting times though :)

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#97

Post by scandox »

Didn't Lidl abandon a 500 million SAP integration recently? I mean perhaps this kind of failure is part of their motivation, but it certainly seems like a leap.

I'm certainly hoping a major European player emerges in cloud but it would be an impressive diversification in this case.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#98

Post by dna_polymerase »

ksec wrote: post #21

If Hetzner ( Also from Germany ) cant / isn't competing with AWS, why does Lidl thinks they can? It then also mention Delivery in UK, and ecommerce projects . Which makes me doubt if the publication knows what AWS really is. The whole piece ( If you can even call it a piece ) is very poor reporting, to the point I am thinking of should I be flagging this. Edit: Please Read Comment by Cu3PO42 https://news.ycombinator.…

Hetzner runs hosting, which ultimately is an administration feat. AWS is above that an engineering feat. Different operations and you would have to hire entirely new people, and I think Hetzner's model still has its appeal.

Re: Lidl to Launch Rival to AWS

#99

Post by SparklingCotton »

Many good reasons why this would work in Europe.

- Logistics in Germany is awesome, and Amazon really doesn't have a leg up on the already existing logistics solutions there.

- For a cloud provider, negotiating deals now when AMD is on the rise must be perfect.

- Beating AWS on EC2 pricing is easy. AWS EC2 pricing is insanely expensive. German providers like Hetzner Cloud entered the market at 1/10th of the EC2 price.

- A k8s-focused cloud provider gets an enormous number of already existing k8s services without the need to compete directly with all the AWS services.

A "Hetzner Cloud" + K8S in Germany? I'd move all my stuff there.

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