Alibaba is known for its sprawling e-commerce empire, but like Amazon, cloud services have been a big driver of its revenue in recent years.
The Chinese cloud giant is down and ready on its overseas reach announcement $1 billion investment in “Global Partner Ecosystem Upgrade” today. Alibaba Cloud Now The third largest public cloud provider in the worldAn achievement that is inseparable from the large network of local allies formed globally.
The institution is constantly Recruiting local partners Taking on responsibilities such as sales, technical support and customer services. The $1 billion initiative aims to “support technology innovation and market expansion of partners with Alibaba Cloud over the next three fiscal years,” the company said. The money will come in the form of both financial and non-financial incentives, including funding, rebates, and go-to-market initiatives.
Alibaba Cloud currently has approximately 11,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM and Neo4J.
Alibaba Cloud will enjoy a 9.5% market share in 2021, followed by Microsoft (21%) and Amazon (39%), according to the market research firm. Gartner.
Cloud services, with a base in Hangzhou and an extensive footprint around the world, have become the cloud solution for many Chinese businesses expanding overseas. But rising national security tensions between China and the West have turned some customers away from its cloud platform. To win over US regulators, TikTok is known Alibaba has moved away from the cloud and migrated all its US data to Oracle servers.
Even early-stage Chinese companies are joining the tech divide. Over the past few months, several consumer-facing Internet startups, including a social network and a productivity tool, have told me they’ve stored all their offshore user data in foreign cloud services just to avoid regulatory scrutiny down the road.
Alibaba Cloud has recently suffered from sluggish growth and the loss of a key cloud client, believed by industry watchers to be ByteDance. As the company mentions June earnings report:
Our Cloud segment’s year-over-year revenue growth reflects recovering growth in the overall non-Internet industry, driven by the financial services, public services and telecommunications industries, partially offset by revenue declines from top Internet customers that have gradually phased out our use of foreign cloud services. Non-product related requirements for international business, due to reduced demand from online education customers as well as other customers in China’s Internet industry.
Western tech companies are under the same decoupling pressure in China. The country’s data laws prohibit user data from leaving its borders, so the likes of Apple and Tesla have long been storing Chinese user data in domestic cloud centers.