Cloud giant Alibaba Cloud have announced that they will soon be unveiling a cloud region in London. With this new region, Alibaba will be setting up a new data center in alliance with the British Telecom to support business in Europe that are using cloud-based services.
According to Alibaba Cloud, businesses in Europe are proficient with the cloud deployment and have critical workloads and applications hosted on the cloud. Having understood this, Alibaba say that they had launched a data center in Frankfurt some time ago to support the cloud needs of clients.
With this new cloud region, Alibaba believe that they will be adding support to their Frankfurt hub in Europe and take care of networking and low-latency issues. They say that with this new data center in London, Alibaba will finally be able to move out of China and set plans to dominate on foreign soils.
The cloud giant says that British Telecom have taken a note of Chinese tech companies doing business since the former have ties with mobile companies like Huawei. They believe that Alibaba Cloud will be able to leverage British Telecom’s expertise with optical networking and development for their data center in London.
Speaking about their cloud expansion across Europe, Yeming Wang, General Manager for Alibaba Cloud EMEA, commented:
It is too early to say we want to compete outside of China with AWS or anybody else, because we have three years [of being active in the market], others have maybe more than ten years. But we want to get excellence in some of the verticals.
Industry experts suggest that these are Alibaba’s initial steps into the European market which will expand across the entire region in a short span of time. They also suggest that Alibaba’s expansion plans are not only eminent in Europe but also across Asian countries like India, where they just cut a deal with APEDB for cloud governance.