bengaluru walmartlabs has cut back on thirdparty outsourcing to india and is looking to strengthen its inhouse technology team with plans to add hundreds of jobs at its bengaluru centre over the next few years its technology chief said the digital arm of the usbased retailing major walmart stores is looking also to strengthen its engagement with startups from india jeremy king said walmartlabs has largely shifted away from the outsourcers we used to be 80 outsource and now weve gone to 20 outsource and typically when we outsource its a very specialist sort of technology or capability that were looking for and we just go with one of the big guys so our relationship has changed dramatically in the last four years and we say you cant outsource innovation king said while parent walmart continues to work with thirdparty outsourcing firms such as infosys and tcs walmartlabs is taking a radically different approach if youre trying to deal with largescale or newage shopping or something innovative its something very difficult to express your customer problems to third parties while walmart as a corporation has a pretty strong relationship in many areas in the backoffice and some other places on the walmartlabs side weve sort of leaned away from that king told et walmartlabs decision is not the first instance in recent times of indian its large customers moving work away from outsourcing companies us home improvement giant lowes drug maker astrazeneca and retailer target are among a number of companies that are taking a hard look at their outsourcing strategies or have started insourcing more tech work to their own captive centres king said he met a number of indian startups during his visit to bengaluru this week and is looking to work closely with and potentially invest in indian startups for disruptive new bets and technology part of the reason im here is to take a look at startups here frankly were opportunistic about what to do with startups were excited about bengaluru startups in particular theyre becoming more and more innovative versus more and more copycat starting to see a lot more innovative products coming out of startups here so typically we partner with startups and talk to the team and if we really like the technology we talk to them about using their technology and tools well hopefully be much more active in bengaluru in the near term he said walmartlabs is working on innovative new technology solutions to improve the instore experiences of customers and is even leveraging opensource technologies king said weve done a lot of innovations that are related to instore digital experiences ive talked about products ike savings catcher and instawatch so if you buy a physical gift at the store then you get a digital copy automatically into your digital account and these innovations are very inter esting especially when you think of he scale of walmart said king by anirban sen et bureau published on oct 16