Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has chosen Vodafone Germany as the first European partner for its Cloud operations and is to open its first data centre at the telecoms company’s premises in Frankfurt, it announced yesterday, as it gears up to compete with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon for a share of the fast-growing cloud computing market.
In a separate announcement, it also confirmed that it is to open a second data centre in Dubai by through YVOLV, a joint venture with the UAE’s Meraas Holdings conglomerate. The centre will be the first “full-fledged public cloud” in the Middle East, the companies are claiming. Two more data centres, one in Australia and one in Japan, are expected to follow by the end of the year.
Dubai’s Smart City initiative made the emirate the logical choice from which to realise its ambitions in the Middle East where, according to the Gartner Group, expenditure on IT is on course to reach $212.9bn by the end of the year The Dubai data centre would meet the “increasing demand” for mission-critical, affordable and secure cloud computing in the region, YVOLV CEO Fahed Al-Hajeri said.
The Cloud is becoming increasingly central to Alibaba’s global ambitions, and the company last year pledged to invest $1bn in its Alibaba Cloud arm. “We want to establish cloud computing as the digital foundation for the new global economy using the opportunities of cloud computing to empower businesses of all sizes across all markets, ” Cloud President Simon Hu, said yesterday. More than 2.3 million customers now use its cloud facilities.
The global cloud computing market – defined as the storage of data on remote networks rather than local servers, – is expected to reach $135bn by 2020, according to research firm Canalys, with Alibaba Cloud forecast to take 7.8% and Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft, IBM and and Alphabet Inc expected to account for 69.1% between them.
Alibaba to open data centres in Dubai and Germany in battle for Cloud
Source: english