Alibaba Group Holding Lt (NYSE:BABA) is muscling up its efforts to expand its cloud offerings globally as part of its move to dominate Amazon, Google and Microsoft in cloud dominance race. The company has settled deals with several cloud-services providing companies for providing cloud services globally. Alibaba will use its own existing data centers developed by the associate companies for offering its own cloud services.
The transmission of cloud services through its own data centers seems lucrative step for the company as it will save money for the firm and through new partnerships the firm will be able to become a potentially strong cloud services provider in new markets.
“There are more and more storage problems and more and more clients are in need for bigger storage capabilities,” Simon Hu, President of Aliyun, said to CNBC.
The executive further said that Alibaba is planning to give small and medium-sized enterprise firms cloud services required for controlling the power of data and analytics.
“We want to be the enabler of other businesses. We want to change the industry,” Hu said.
Alibaba has seven partners in cloud computing domain which includes U.S. data center company Equinix, Singapore telecoms giant Singtel and Intel. These partnerships enable the e-commerce giant to better compete with its rivals and ease the firm’s ambitions to proliferate globally.
The company is under pressure of the firms like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, which controls the $16 billion cloud computing market, based on data provided by the Synergy Research Group.
All these firms are propagating in this domain at a rapid rate. Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels said earlier this year that Amazon cloud business possibly will go beyond its retail business in 10 years.
Alibaba has also seen its cloud business growing at a fast speed. In the last quarter the firm’s Aliyan’s segment revenue climbed up 388 million yuan, up 82 percent from 213 million yuan in the year earlier period. Yet the revenue contributed by the cloud business makes a tiny fraction of the company’s overall revenue.
“They are great role models for Aliyun we want to learn from their strengths. At Aliyun we want to benefit from technology profits and help society create a better balance and increase efficiency,” Hu told CNBC.
This isn’t the first time that Alibaba is expanding its cloud offerings globally. Alibaba opened a data center in Silicon Valley at the start of the year, its first in the U.S. but now the firm wants to dominate in this area in other parts of the world without considering that it costs the firm as it builds new data centers in different countries.
