Alibaba to step up cloud computing expansion amid growing global demand
- Subsidiary Alibaba Cloud, which turns 10 this year, has become the company’s main business focus
Alibaba Group Holding, China’s biggest e-commerce company, plans to ratchet up the expansion of its cloud computing ecosystem with more strategic partnerships and services, intensifying its global competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.
Chief technology officer Jeff Zhang Jianfeng, who serves as president of subsidiary Alibaba Cloud, said the new initiative will make the 10-year-old business unit “a more technologically inclusive platform” at the company’s cloud summit in Beijing on Thursday.
“Today, Alibaba Cloud not only provides infrastructure support to the entire Alibaba economy, but has also developed proven technologies to empower millions of customers in China and worldwide,” Zhang said. “In the future, our highly compatible and standards-based platform will allow SaaS [software-as-a-service] partners to [join] on-board easily and thrive.”
Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud now operates in more than 200 countries and territories. It is China’s largest public cloud services provider, with a 43 per cent share in the first half of last year, according to research firm IDC. The company was also the fourth biggest cloud services provider worldwide last year, behind AWS, Microsoft’s Azure business and Google Cloud, according to Canalys.
Zhang’s announcement has come several weeks after Alibaba chief executive Daniel Zhang Yong unveiled the e-commerce giant’s “A100” effort, which aims to accelerate its transformation into an integrated technology provider to companies around the world. New York-listed Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.
