Alibaba Cloud Turns Focus To Building Products For Indian Market

Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence vertical of Alibaba Group, has announced a China Gateway Programme to ease the entry of international companies into China. The company also stressed on the importance of Indian market for its cloud-enabled services.

Alibaba Cloud has launched this programme in partnership with eight Chinese organisations to assist international companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in expanding to China.

Under the China Gateway Programme, the regional partners will support international companies by connecting them with Chinese companies and consumers through the Alibaba ecosystem.

Commenting on the timeline for launch of China Gateway Programme in India, Alibaba Cloud intelligence international president, Selina Yuan told Livemint, “Today the programme was launched and I can tell you that we are ready for India. It’s a global programme and we already have 700 SMEs which will benefit from it.”

Besides the China Gateway Programme, the company also announced 10 new products and features that will for the first time be accessible for global customers.

These new products and features include a clutch of cloud based services PolarDB, Alibaba Log Service (SLS), Support of “Bring Your Own Key”(BYOK), SaaS Accelerator, Smart Access Gateway (SAG) Software, Container Registry (ACR) Enterprise Edition, Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK).

These announcements were made at the Alibaba Cloud APAC Summit today (May 30, 2019) in Singapore. The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider offers a suite of cloud computing services to startups and enterprise clients.

India An Important Market For Alibaba Cloud

Stressing on the significance of the Indian market, Henry Zhang, chief product officer of Alibaba Cloud told Livemint, “Indian customers are very much on the cutting edge. Some of the largest growing startups such as Paytm and Big Basket are in India. We are focussed on building products and services that will benefit Indian customers”

Yuan too supported Zhang’s claim and said the company recognises India as an important market and that’s why it already has data centres in the country. Alibaba Cloud has a dedicated team based in Mumbai and big local customers such as Paytm.

Major IaaS service providers such as Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Google Cloud and Microsoft also have dedicated operations based out of India, and have a significant presence in the market thanks to their ties to the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem and reputed MNC clients. According to a recent NASSCOM report, India’s cloud spending in 2018 was estimated to be $2.5 Bn and is projected to grow at 30% per year to reach around $ 7.1Bn by 2022. Further, the IaaS spending in India was estimated to be $1 Bn in 2018 and is forecasted to grow at 25% per annum to reach around $2.3 Bn by 2022.