Whisperware: Target.com Rumored to Have Switched Over to IBM Smarter Commerce

Image via CrunchBaseWe have not been able to get confirmation of this, but a friend visiting a conference in San Diego tells us that Target.com dropped Amazon EC2 for competitor IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions, allegedly because Target was peeved that the cloud services functionality they were promised failed to perform.

Our friendly source tells us that Target has been wanting to do this for a while. Again, we don't know if this is true, and we have not been able to confirm this with anyone at IBM.

The breaking point seems to have been the failed Missoni launch at Target.com which led to outages.

The source tells us: “Amazon basically failed to deliver as promised a platform to Target. Same issue that Toys R Us faced. Amazon ended up competing with their customers as they shifted strategy from store to provider and back.”

Target.com late last week launched a line of Missoni clothes on its online shop, only to see the server’s crash and thwart angry customers, who clamored for the new release. The Target relationship with IBM is supposedly very good and very positive.