Is Alibaba Looking to Challenge American Clouds

Grazed from CloudWedge. Author: Natalie Lerner.

Here is what we know so far. Alibaba, the largest ecommerce company in China has a cloud computing component, called Aliyun (or AliCloud). It was established in the later part of 2009, with R&D centers and operators in Hangzhou, Beijing and Silicon Valley. Aliyun has steadily been growing its cloud offering, and in earlier last month, Aliyun entered into a partnership deal with Inspur, the largest high-end cloud computing company in China. Thereby enabling them to offer a complete package of cloud computing services within China. Their clientele are mainly either local businesses operating locally or local businesses operating in other countries.

It is reported that last year, Alibaba had revenue of $102 million just from cloud and infrastructure sales, this is a 26% increase from the year before. Also, back in May of this year, Alibaba made a clear statement on their cloud-focused intentions, “We have made, and intend to continue to make, strategic investments and acquisitions to expand our user base, enhance our cloud computing business, add complementary products and technologies and further strengthen our ecosystem…

For example, we expect to continue to make strategic investments and acquisitions relating to mobile, O2O services, digital media, category expansion as well as logistics services.”…

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