Alibaba Cloud comes to India with new data centre
Wed 20 Dec 2017
Alibaba Cloud has opened a data centre in Mumbai in order to serve an expanding Indian market.
The firm, which has made major steps towards catching major western cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google in recent years, is pursuing India as part of a global expansion policy.
The new data centre, located in the major Indian city of Mumbai, will help the Chinese giant meet rapidly growing demand from SMEs in India.
Alibaba sees a major opportunity in India, given the country’s rapid economic growth, and the type of enterprise businesses that are looking to expand from the country.
By giving these businesses access to a suite of products such as large-scale computing, storage resources and big data capabilities through its cloud platform, Alibaba hopes to capitalise on that growth and corner the market.
Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, said: “We are excited to be officially opening our new Mumbai data centre, 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.
“As we build out the Alibaba Cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is now firmly in place. This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond.”
Set to open in January 2018, the data centre will also open up tools like elastic computing, storage and content delivery, networking, containers, middleware and security, to Indian customers.
Alongside that, customers in the country will have access to a team on the ground, providing planning, implementation and after-sales support.
Indian businesses have already been given access to Alibaba Cloud through a series of partnerships, with Global Cloud Xchange and Tata Communications, both of which provided direct connections to the Alibaba cloud, though this move provides improved services and access.
The Chinese firm is one of two major players in China that completely dominate the market – the other being Tencent. Both have revenues in excess of 150 billion Chinese Yen (approx. £17 billion) and have diverse portfolios of both digital and physical products.
