Alibaba Cloud Taking The Fight To AWS In 2018

Well, it’s not like the other AWS competitors are small fish, but Alibaba Cloud is scary in the sense of how fast it is growing. The Chinese company has surprised everyone this year.

Posting massive growth over the course of 2017.

And the company is in the same aggressive mood for 2018, confirming that it is gearing up for serious combat against Amazon Web Services in the coming months. Alibaba Cloud wants to compete globally with AWS, and this basically means growing its US presence.

Easier said than done, yes.

But China’s biggest public cloud provider already has datacenters in Silicon Valley and Virginia. Not to mention, it is partnered up with US companies like NVIDIA and Cisco on cloud datacenter technology.

According to the company’s second fiscal quarter 2018 earnings call last month, the company’s cloud revenue increased 99% year-over-year. And at its AliCloud conference in October, it outlined plans to invest $15 billion over the next three years in cloud computing research and development.

Their largest market share may be in China, a market that AWS can’t ignore, but they are now clearly moving westbound.

The firm announced a new cloud datacenter in India on December 20, and the next stop is Europe, as it achieved cloud compliance accreditation with the German federal office for information security earlier this month.

And while the two US datacenters that Alibaba has primarily cater to Chinese companies operating in the United States, the cloud giant is formulating a more flexible strategy for the US market.

The idea being to build up synergy for US companies that go to China, allowing these enterprises the ability to host the same SaaS in the Alibaba Cloud in the US, and essentially deploying their services more quickly in the United States.

How well that happens remains to be seen.

But considering the fact how quickly Alibaba has been able to grow, and is outpacing its top two competitors, it would be foolhardy to bet against it.