Alibaba, best known for being one of the world’s e-commerce giants (behind AliExpress, Alibaba.com and Tmall), wants to double its cloud business outside of China. The largest public cloud service provider in the Asian country and the third largest in the world, after Amazon and Microsoft, announced an investment of $1,000 million (€1,025 million) to “modernize the global partner ecosystem” and that they assume sales, technical support and service responsibilities clients.
The company, which provides cloud services covering networking, storage and computing, currently has about 11,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortnite and IBM. In 2021, according to Gartner, the Chinese multinational reached a market share of 9.5%, compared to 21% for Microsoft and 39% for Amazon Web Services.
Rodrigo Cipriani, General Manager of Alibaba Group for Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, stated in a recent interview with Cinco Dias that Alibaba Cloud started its business in Europe a few years ago And that they already have two data centers in Germany, where they have a team of people, as well as in France. He also noted that they have Spanish clients, although they do not yet have their own Alibaba Cloud team in Spain. Chapriani left the door open to open more data centers in Europe if needed, given that the European Union has very strict regulations on data protection and is committed to digital sovereignty.
The company said in a statement that the $1 billion investment aims to “support our partners’ technology innovation and market expansion through our cloud over the next three fiscal years.” This money will come in the form of financial and non-financial incentives.
Alibaba also announced the opening of three customer service centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Porto (Portugal) and Mexico City (Mexico) to assist its customers in their journey to the cloud, and three other centers to improve its technical support, one in the aforementioned Malaysia city, and another in Dubai (UAE). United Arab Emirates) and Hong Kong.
The company announced last August that its cloud computing business grew 10% in the first fiscal quarter, When it issued invoices between all of its businesses 205,555 million yuan (nearly 30 thousand million euros), almost the same number as in the same period the previous year. Alibaba, which earned a net profit of 22.739 million yuan (about 3,306 million euros) in that quarter, 50% less than the same period a year earlier, attributed this fall to the Covid outbreak in China.
According to a TechCrunch report, Alibaba Cloud has been the cloud solution for many Chinese companies expanding overseas, but rising security tensions between China and the West have pushed some companies, such as TikTok, away from its cloud platform. In any case, Alibaba’s move seeks to take advantage of the fact that global spending on public clouds will approach $500 billion this year, and stand up to US cloud giants (Amazon, Microsoft and Google). These companies continue to expand across Europe, although they are now facing an investigation by the British regulator, Ofcom, which will assess whether these three companies are limiting innovation and growth, and avoiding competition problems.
“Beeraholic. Friend of animals everywhere. Evil web scholar. Zombie maven.”