Alibaba Cloud Will Build Special Teams To Focus On Startups, Online Business

As Tencent looks to enter Indian cloud services, its global challenger Alibaba Group has launched its new distribution channel programme in a bid to strengthen its presence in India. According to reports, a senior Alibaba Cloud executive believes now is a great opportunity to do business in India.

Alex Li, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Asia Pacific, said, “Alibaba Cloud has always been dedicated to empower enterprises of different sizes to tap into opportunities in the digital age. With digital transformation poised to add close to $154 Bn to India’s GDP, this is a great opportunity for us to do business in India.”

During the “India Eco Summit”, the company launched its new distribution channel programme to encourage partners to bring in-depth technical knowledge to customers.

With the new channel strategy, Alibaba Cloud said it will also build specialised teams to focus on various market segments and sectors such as start-up and online business.

At the same time to strengthen this network, the group plans to train 1,000 sales and technology personnel in India in the next six months.

In India, Alibaba Cloud provides products and services to clients in India across the e-commerce, gaming, media, retail and IoT sectors through an extensive network of distributors.

The company opened its first India data centre in Mumbai in January 2018 to address the increasing demand for Cloud computing services among the fast-increasing number of Indian small and medium-sized businesses in the region.

This comes at a time when global search giant Google is also strengthening its cloud services reach in India. Rick Harshman, MD, Asia-Pacific, Google Cloud, said that the company has seen “overwhelming demand from businesses and startups in the retail, media, entertainment, and gaming segments.”

With no concrete plans for a formal rollout, Tencent has been exploring the Indian market for the past few months and has initiated preliminary discussions with some companies, mostly startups in the video and online live-streaming space.

With an estimated $2.12 Bn spent on public Cloud services, India currently ranks third on the list of countries in Asia Pacific excluding Japan, according to a study by the International Data Corp (IDC).

Gartner projects that Indian public cloud services revenue will grow by 37.5% in 2018 to a total of  $2.5 Bn, up from $1.8 Bn in 2017. Further, a Forbes report added that $1.8 Bn of 2017 is expected to reach $4.1 Bn by 2020.

As Alibaba Cloud strengthens its India business, entrants like Tencent and well-established players like Amazon (AWS), Google Cloud etc continue to pick up the pace too.

[The development was reported by ET.]