In another sign that Walmart is excited to live up to its moniker as a “technology company,” the world’s largest retailer hired a 25-year tech industry executive whose career history involves halts at tech giants like Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon, Walmart’s crucial rivals.
Kumar was recently active at Google as vice president and general director of the display, video, app ads, as well as for analytics. He had been responsible for Google’s advertising revenue in regions such as GooglePlay Store, Gmail, and parts of YouTube, based on his LinkedIn profile, which states he helped drive growth while “significantly” decreasing Google’s costs to drive customer traffic.
Before Google, he was the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and operations. Before that he was active for 15 years at Amazon in various leadership roles, Kumar’s obligations covered managing a global team of 500 engineers behind the technology that runs Amazon’s pricing, promotions, and other retail functions, his LinkedIn page shows.
Also, He was a research staff member at IBM just before Amazon.
Walmart “is in the midst of a fascinating digital transformation,” Kumar said in a news release. “The potential for technology to help people at scale is unparalleled.”
“Suresh has a unique understanding of the intersection of technology and retail, including supply chain, and has deep experience in advertising, cloud and machine learning,” McMillan said in a statement.