Alibaba’s cloud computing and data intelligence arm has defined its market position as the top dog in the Asia Pacific IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and IUS (Infrastructure Utility Services) market in 2018 with a 4.7% annual market share growth, a recent Gartner report shows.
Alibaba Cloud, which dominated the Asia Pacific market with a 19.6% market share last year, had earned more than global industry leaders Amazon and Microsoft put together, according to Gartner. Amazon and Microsoft’s market shares for 2018 were 11% and 8%, respectively.
Lancelot Guo, vice president of Alibaba Group and head of strategy and marketing at Alibaba Cloud, said his company would “continue to champion” millions of local businesses in the region with their “world-class infrastructure, advanced analytics tools, and thriving ecosystem.” Alibaba Cloud currently operates in 15 local data centers outside mainland China, covering Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Japan.
But challenges from other multinationals might be coming faster than the Hangzhou-based Chinese tech giant would like. Wen Ku, a senior Chinese official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, hinted yesterday at a State Council press conference that China might be further opening its cloud computing industry to foreign companies.
“[F]oreign companies are welcome to actively participate in the cloud computing market, explore effective ways to further open the market, and help to boost the market,” he said.
China is the world’s fastest-growing public cloud market, with a 76.5% annual growth in 2018. Microsoft and Apple both entered China’s cloud computing market years ago, but failed to grab bigger chunks of the market, partly due to policy restrictions.