A five-year engineering pact between Walmart and Microsoft was signed on Tuesday to clash with Amazon in the AI, cloud computing and retail sectors.

Both companies have marched into healthcare and have been rivals of the online giant Amazon at individual levels.

Company executives at Microsoft say that its optimized Azure services for a health cloud platform facilitate customers to focus on clinical and operational competence. The company is also offering AI capabilities and Microsoft Genomics, which the  St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital utilizes.

Likewise, Walmart already operates pharmacies and a growing healthcare business, a market that Amazon forayed into late last month after acquiring the online pharmacy Pillpack. 

For the new alliance, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will team up on the evaluation, expansion, and maintenance phase of shifting hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native structures. 

 Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said Walmart will gain entry into Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Microsoft 365 to speed up transformation.

After having used some of Microsoft’s services, Walmart is now looking up for new possibilities, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and data platforms that bring new capabilities which company officials remarked will make shopping quicker and easier. It also plans to transport a notable segment of walmart.com and samsclub.com to Azure, including its cloud-powered check-out.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon commented that the affiliation will compel the company’s “ability to innovate further and faster.”