Earlier this year, Simon Hu, president of China’s Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, vowed to “match or surpass Amazon in four years” regarding customers, technology and worldwide scale.
Given Alibaba’s high growth rate, this was perhaps not such a wild claim.
Indeed much of their growth has been within China; they are growing globally. Their latest competitive strike against the likes of AWS and Azure was announced today. Alibaba Cloud seems to be avoiding direct, head-to-head competition, and have instead launched their EMEA Partner Programme.
However, this approach is far from feeble. Leading industry players like; Intel, Accenture, Hashicorp, Ecritel, Altran, Micropole and Linkbynet are among the primary participants in the EMEA Ecosystem Partner Program.
Earlier today, Alibaba Group also announced their global partnership agreement with Bolloré Group, one of the 500 largest companies in the world.
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Cyrille Bolloré, Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Bolloré Group, commented: “We are delighted to have concluded this comprehensive partnership agreement with a leading international company such as Alibaba Group. We are looking forward to working with them and their subsidiaries to develop business in our respective markets and join forces in other parts of the world.”
“The many areas of cooperation and several joint projects already identified by our respective teams are particularly promising. We are also very pleased by our common willingness to share best practice and expertise that will be of strong benefit to all our companies.”
Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud EMEA, said: “Our goal in EMEA is to bring powerful and elastic cloud services to our customers and create a well-connected, comprehensive ecosystem with our partners to accelerate cloud technology development in the regional cloud industry.”
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He added: “As a global cloud industry leader, Alibaba Cloud brings to EMEA cutting-edge cloud technologies and experience and expertise to drive innovations across various verticals. We aim to empower our customers as they undergo their digital transformation which will greatly improve their business efficiency and ability to provide a positive experience for their customers.”
In a recent article published in the South China Post, their EMEA expansions will see Alibaba introduce products designed and developed for overseas markets, which is unlike the previous strategy of internationalising their China products.
Speaking to Information Age, Wang added: “Today, when a company wants to adopt cloud infrastructure they are not simply hoping to reduce costs, they are looking for something that can help develop their business.”
“CTOs and CIOs are looking for more than an IT supplier they want a business partner.”
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Wang added that they also look to take advantage of their geographical reach, as they are rooted in the eastern world, they will be better able to serve their western clients efforts to develop in Asia.
“Alibaba produces a lot of different platforms and features and we are ready to offer this to external clients,” he added.
The latest announcement seems very credible, but only time will tell if their efforts will pay off. They face strong competitions, speaking globally, Alibaba has less than four per cent of the cloud market, positioning them much lower than the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Google.
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