Alibaba says it is on track to overtake Amazon as world’s top cloud computing services firm
The head of Alibaba Cloud says its huge domestic market and international expansion, coupled with a technological edge, will put it ahead of its rivals
Alibaba’s cloud computing business is on track to achieve its goal of surpassing Amazon’s Amazon Web Service (AWS) unit to become the world’s top provider of cloud services, according to the head of Alibaba Cloud.
“While market expansion needs to be step by step, the technical capabilities of Alibaba Cloud are as good as Amazon’s AWS,” said Hu. He had vowed in 2015 to “match or surpass Amazon in four years” in terms of customers, technology and worldwide scale.
Alibaba made its foray into the cloud services business in 2009, opening cloud storage, computing and data analysis technologies to third-party customers, three years after Amazon founded its cloud division. Alibaba Cloud currently has about one million paying users.
Last year, Alibaba Cloud ranked third behind Amazon and Microsoft in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud services market, according to a report by research firm Gartner.
The division saw its revenue surge by 126.5 per cent from US$298 million in 2015 to US$675 million in 2016, driven by the domestic market, where it has a 40.7 per cent share, according to Gartner.
“The large internet population in China and the country’s booming internet economy have given Alibaba Cloud a golden opportunity,” Hu said. “That is why we have been the fastest growing cloud computing company for the past several years.”