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After commanding a huge market share on the home pitch and assuming the significant role of being access provider to the markets in China, Chinese technology major Alibaba has plans to build its presence across EMEA region.
Challenging the Behemoths
The decision to enter a fiercely competitive cloud market in EMEA region, which has been already dominated by major names such as Microsoft, AWS and Google was taken almost eighteen months ago by senior management of Alibaba Cloud. One can list a large number of features of Alibaba Cloud that bear close resemblance to cloud offerings of its western counterparts including AWS, Google, and Microsoft Azure.
These include advanced capabilities of elastic computing, machine learning and other analytics, application services, and a vast multitude of database and storage services. These services range from fundamental model of Infrastructure as a service. Alibaba cloud computing division was incepted almost a decade ago.
In terms of its extensive coverage, Alibaba Cloud is covering entire China with 7 zones of availability with equal number in Hong Kong and Asia Pacific. Alibaba Cloud is also available for customers in US, Europe including Germany, France, and UK, and Dubai Thanks to dedicated local zones of availability in these regions. Alibaba Cloud has been able to support an impressive array of big internet companies in addition to providing ecommerce and tech services to a whopping five hundred million active customers.
With reference to Alibaba Cloud’s plans to enter Europe Middle East and Africa region, local teams have already been deployed in all location of EMEA region such as Dubai, UK, Germany and France.
Proven Experience
Alibaba Cloud aims to disrupt major existing players in this region including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services. There are few key reasons for such a move on part of Alibaba Cloud and the most obvious objective is to fulfill a huge and ever growing requirement of cloud computing products by enterprise clients of this region. Europe is an exciting market for Alibaba Cloud due to its strategic position. Alibaba Cloud plans to build more and more innovative products through its Europe operations.
Alibaba Cloud has been engaged in delivering a large gamut of cloud services to the vast cloud markets in China and has thereby proved its credibility. Secondly, it has helped a great number of Chinese organizations set their footprint across Europe and Dubai by leveraging the availability zones including the one in Frankfurt.
Alibaba Cloud has already demonstrated its enormous capabilities by handling excruciatingly demanding workloads with ease. It has handled millions of transactions per second on occasions such as ‘Single’s Day’ which happens to be similar to ‘Black Friday’ in western countries. These performance capabilities qualify Alibaba Cloud to compete with major Public Cloud hosting service providers including AWS, Google, and Microsoft.
Advantage of Chinese Regulations
Moreover, Alibaba Cloud bears the distinction of operating its own infrastructure across several zones in China. Since Chinese law cannot permit any foreign cloud service provider to build own infrastructure there, Alibaba will always enjoy the benefit of being the largest service provider with own facilities.
Although, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have a small presence in China, it is through third party operators as the law in China restricts them from building own infrastructure on Chinese soil. Hence it can be conclude that Alibaba is the only global cloud provider in true sense with its own facilities in China as well as outside.
Developers can easily adapt to Alibaba cloud if they are comfortable working with AWS or Google because of a large number of similarities in terms of APIs and cloud behavior that exists across all major cloud service providers in India. Users can easily shift to Alibaba Cloud without any hassles.
Proven Abilities Across Verticals
If you separate customers on the basis of their cloud objectives, then it is easy to understand the unique strengths of Alibaba in terms of ability to deliver vertical-specific cloud solutions. Alibaba has been spearheading growth of fintech and retail in China.
Another unique differentiator that needs to be considered while assessing Alibaba Cloud’s capabilities to disrupt major cloud players in EMEA region is Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning. You can leverage ET Brain to gain AI capabilities that can be implemented across specific verticals. ET Brain can be successfully applied in sectors including Industries, healthcare and smart urban living.
Whatever may be the case, Alibaba must clearly demonstrate some measureable and tangible results in European markets instead of just harping on its ability of scaling. If the statements by its C-level executives are to be believed, one can wait for another six months before Alibaba shares some exciting news on this front.
Takeaway
Alibaba is all set to disrupt leading hosting providers of cloud services in markets outside China with its proven ability to manage large workloads and its unique capabilities of supporting verticals.
