Alibaba to fast-track expansion of cloud business with key partners
Managed services providers like Datapipe help Chinese firms growing overseas and global companies entering China to move their applications online
Alibaba Cloud, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s cloud computing subsidiary, is looking to fire up its international expansion and narrow the gap with Amazon Web Services through closer ties with so-called managed services providers.
The Hangzhou-based company recently named Datapipe, a privately held US information technology services provider, as its first international partner tasked to help ease the cloud set-up for Chinese organisations venturing abroad and multinational firms entering mainland China.
Ethan Yu Sicheng, the general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s global operations, said the company plans to add more managed services provider partners because of the large workload involved in moving enterprise applications over to the cloud.
Cloud computing enables companies to buy, sell, lease or distribute online a range of software and other digital resources as an on-demand service, just like electricity from a power grid. These resources are kept and managed inside data centres. “Cloud” refers to the internet as depicted in computer network diagrams.
“In this industry, we see customers relying on managed services providers to not only implement their mobile applications, but also to find the right cloud providers for them and manage their resources afterwards,” Yu said.
Scalability is one of the core benefits of moving to the cloud
He declined to say how many managed services providers Alibaba Cloud has partnered with so far.