Alibaba Cloud Soon Take Second Place, Behind AWS

Tall claim to make, but a company executive is confident that Alibaba Cloud is on track to unseat the Microsoft Azure platform, and become the second biggest player in the space.

After Amazon Web Services, of course.

What’s more interesting is that the Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group is hopeful of this happening in just two or three years from now. This is what Alibaba Cloud President Simon Hu has said, as he expressed his confidence in the growing market share.

He was speaking at the company’s Computing Conference, which took place from October 11 to 14.

Hu told the audience that success in the cloud service sector hinges more on large-scale operational experience than on technology, because the former is key to understanding how to meet market demand.

And as you can gather, both Alibaba and Amazon have an upper hand in the cloud service market over their competitors, what with the fact that both are large internet service operators.

Simon Hu further notes that supportive government initiatives like China’s One Belt One Road Initiative has helped Alibaba Cloud and other Chinese companies boost industrial upgrading and technological development based on cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, though, the Alibaba Cloud executive only expects the US and China to compete in the global cloud computing market.

The United States has taken the lead in developing cloud computing, but China, with its large manufacturing sector, and the world’s largest population has been quick to develop mature service applications — applications that continue to propel the development of Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud has shown remarkable growth lately, thanks in large parts due to strong domestic growth, and the company posted revenues of $675 million in 2016, up 126.5%.

AWS posted $12.2 billion in revenue over the same period.

Interesting stuff.