Alibaba Cloud Comes To India; Direct Competition With Amazon, Google, Microsoft

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is set to enter the Indian market with its cloud-computing arm, Alibaba Cloud. The group's entry in Asia's second-largest country will accelerate the growth this sector has been seeing with existing players such as Microsoft's Azure Stack and Google, among others. Simon Hu, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud, said in a statement, "We are excited to be officially opening our new Mumbai data centre in early 2018, enabling us to work closely with more Indian enterprises... These local enterprises are innovative and operating in growth sectors, and we look forward to empowering them through our Cloud computing and data technologies." Alibaba will also open a data centre in Mumbai in January 2018 and has reportedly tied up with Global Cloud Xchange (a subsidiary of Reliance Communications) which enables direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect. Reportedly, Alibaba Cloud's entry in India will help over 51 million Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) "begin their Cloud journey". According to their statement, Alibaba Cloud's data centre in India will offer computing, database, storage, content delivery, networking, analytics and big data, among other services. Alibaba Cloud would also have a local team of consultants to provide service planning, implementation and after-sales support, helping Indian companies move to the cloud. "As we build the cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is firmly in place. This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond. This will extend what Alibaba Cloud is already doing to service thousands of customers from India globally," Hu said. Alibaba Cloud has 33 zones in 16 economic centres worldwide, with coverage extending across China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, West Asia, Europe, India and the US. Set up in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is among the largest providers of public cloud services in China and one of the largest Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers in the world.