Is Lidl moving into the business of running cloud-scale datacenters?

There are rumors/fake news that Lidl is moving into the cloud-space. I’d say that the rumors overstate the meaning, as they are probably looking into insourcing their cloud push. They’ve previously tried and failed with a single pane of glass approach for Cloud, and who doesn’t remember Lidls costly ERP failure pushing for SAP, costing them over 500 million EUR over seven years without anything to show.

But lets imagine that they are actually looking into create their own Cloud - it would make sense as they have made a lot of money (104 billion EUR in 2018/2019) the last 40 years with their brand of discount retailing. Listening to insiders, the general idea of Lidl is that they are more than just Lidl and there is a general sense of hubris which is shown when newly opened stores in the US are closed after a few months.

‘We’re not just some random company, we’re Schwarz Group’

Looking at the whole corporation, it is basically a 2-person-empire run by a 70- and 80-year old. They have pretty good connections with a former SAP cloud sales VP which probably propelled this idea. The common mindset between Lidl and SAP might be what makes this push. Core Schwarz is all about selling cheap products at a enormous scale. Core SAP is all about large scale enterprise sales. Maybe they have enough money to do whatever they want because their business actually doesn’t depend on IT. The systems they use to run their business are clearly working, because shops are still open and filled with people.

Note that Lidl are also at the same time getting into the car sales, tourism and recycle business as well. Probably looking at Amazon on how to privot into different markets in Europe. If the Schwarz group will be able to attract the talent to replicate the talents in other clouds then they have a chance, otherwise it is probably impossible. What is a more likely scenario that they will burn through a few billion EUR before realizing that they know nothing about cloud computing and cut their losses. The rumor above started with an acquisition of 70 people which just might be the start of something bigger by spinning it up as a separate company, just like AWS. Or not, based on previous IT experiences.

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