Ethan Yu, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Global, Simon Hu, President of Alibaba Cloud
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has officially opened its new datacentre in Sydney.
The Australian facility is part of the e-commerce giant’s strategy to expand its global network coverage, with a string of facilities to follow operation in Germany, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
According to Alibaba Group managing director for A/NZ, Maggie Zhou, the company’s globalisation strategy in Australia is only possible via localisation.
“Our globalisation strategy is localisation. We recognise that only if we work with local partners here, we will see success. This includes the government, includes the channel partners and businesses here. We are also very eager to bring Alibaba cloud here in Australia to enable the young people, the SMBs and the startups,” she said.
While the company is yet to fully build its ecosystem in the Australian market - with its decision to sign with particular distributors still under wraps - Alibaba Cloud general manager of global business, Ethan Yu, highlighted the importance of leveraging local channel partners that offer "innovative solutions".
“The middle-sized and small sized ones will be our preferred partners, however, we do not exclude other partners. We are looking for channel partners that do not only have customer reach, but those who offer innovative solutions on top of Alibaba Cloud.”
“It is that core stuff that is the cutting-edge difference to end customers. We will have massive training facilities in Australia to train our end customers and channel partners and will have a certification program, just like AWS does.”
Yu added that innovative partners with expertise around the Internet of Things and gaming solutions will be salient in the channel expansion strategy.
The company named only Accenture as one of its signed Australian channel partners so far.
According to Alibaba, the company’s cloud business has been growing its top line at triple-digit rates, with revenues jumping 130 percent to RMB 1.49 billion ($292.4 million) in the September quarter.
Alibaba also said its cloud business currently has more than 2.3 million customers worldwide, including 651,000 paying clients.
