Alibaba to take on Amazon in U.S. cloud services

March 4, 2015 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from Mashable. Author: Seth Fiegerman.

Alibaba may be taking on Amazon in another key category. The Chinese e-commerce giant announced on Wednesday that its cloud computing business, Aliyun, is entering the U.S. market with a new data center located in Silicon Valley. "Now, Aliyun hopes to meet the needs of Chinese enterprises in the United States, and the ultimate objective of Aliyun is to bring cost-efficient and cutting-edge cloud computing services to benefit more clients outside China to boost their business development,” Ethan Sicheng Yu, vice-president of Aliyun, said in a statement.

A rep for the company said the service is available to U.S. customers starting Wednesday. Aliyun will offer customers a free six-month trial of its elastic computing service. The entry would seem to put Alibaba into closer competition with comparable cloud offerings from U.S. tech giants, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft…

Forrester Research projected last year that business spending on cloud computing offerings would hit nearly $200 billion by 2020, perhaps explaining why so many established tech companies are trying to claim a piece of the space…

Read more from the source @ http://mashable.com/2015/03/04/alibaba-cloud-computing/