Tag: Alibaba

IaaS market growing claims Gartner

Posted on July 19, 2023 by - News

Canalys Forum EuropeThe worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 29.7 per cent in 2022, to $120.3 billion, up from $92.8 billion in 2021, according to Gartner.

Amazon retained the top position in the IaaS market in 2022, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and Huawei.

Gartner VP analyst Sid Nag said that Cloud had been elevated from a technology disruptor to a business disruptor.

“IaaS is driving software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) growth as buyers to continue to add more applications to the cloud and modernise existing ones.”

“IaaS growth in 2022 was stronger than expected, despite a slight softening in the fourth quarter as customers focused on using their previously committed capacity to its fullest potential,” added Nag.

“This is expected to continue until mid-2023 and is a natural outcome of the market’s maturity. We expect an acceleration in 2024, as there is still room for additional growth.”

In 2022, the top five IaaS providers accounted for over 80 per cent of the market. Amazon continued to lead the worldwide IaaS market with revenue of $48.1 billion and a 40 per cent market share.

Alibaba Cloud wants to grow global partner ecosystem

Posted on May 17, 2023 by - News

Alibaba Cloud wants to grow its global partner ecosystem and is ramping up its support and incentives.

At the Alibaba Cloud Partner Summit 2023, the firm outlined several initiatives to grow its partner base. These included launching an independent software vendor (ISV) acceleration programme, increased training for partners and more rewards for the best performers.

The ISV programme includes incentives and technical support to make Alibaba Cloud more attractive and add more depth to the cloud player’s marketplace offering. Its rivals have similar offerings, having recognised the importance of offering customers a wide range of applications.

Cloud rains profits

Posted on January 25, 2023 by - News

Public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operators and vendors’ revenue jumped 21 per cent to $544 billion in 2022.

New data from Synergy Research Group claims that the biggest growth was seen in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).

Annual revenue from these services grew 29 per cent to reach more than $195 billion, despite some headwinds from the strengthening US dollar and problems in the Chinese market.

In the other main segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $229 billion in service revenues, having grown by an average 19 per cent from 2021.

Synergy said public cloud providers spent $120 billion on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 13 per cent from the previous year.

Alibaba sees cloud sales rise

Posted on August 24, 2020 by - News

Alibaba saw its cloud sales rise in its last quarter, driven by both public and hybrid cloud adoption.

The Chinese giant’s cloud sales shot up 59 percent year on year to $1.7 billion during the quarter ending 30 June, equating to eight percent of the firm’s total revenue.

Alibaba CEO Daniel Daniel Zhang said: “The pandemic has transformed the way enterprises work, accelerating demand for cloud infrastructure and services. If you look at our revenue breakdown, obviously, cloud is enjoying a very, very fast growth and what we see is that all the industries are in the process of digital transformation.”

Alibaba remains the largest cloud provider in China, but Zhang said that analysts have pegged the US market as being much larger than in its homeland – indicating that there is still plenty of room for growth.

Alibaba Cloud seeks partners as it announces UK hub

Posted on October 23, 2018 by - News

Alibaba Cloud is looking for business partners after it launched its two London-based datacentres.

Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud for EMEA, said that the  UK is the biggest cloud market in Europe and it’s an early cloud adopter.

“The region is really good regarding the market share; the adoption and its mindset are quite open, especially in the services and research areas.”

The UK expansion adds to the EMEA hubs that Alibaba has already established in Frankfurt and Dubai, and Wang said that the London datacentres were already up and running.

Wang said that the company has developed local partners, but is on the hunt for more.

“The business scenario will be localised. In the UK, we want to join our Chinese experience and technology with the know-how of local partners, and then we jointly go to market. We are working on defining a lot of localised partner programmes to help them find their position with Alibaba, which is different from their partnerships with other cloud service providers. It’s very promising, and that is why the company is happy to put the datacentre here”, Wang said.

 

Alibaba launching a London datacentre

Posted on September 11, 2018 by - News

banner_220x220The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn claiming that the Chinese retailer Alibaba is launching a London datacentre.

The rumours are based  on  information displayed on a newly added landing page, where the outfit said it offer flexible compute services from £30.87 a month from its new London region as it bids to take on AWS, Azure and Google in the UK.

Under the heading ‘London is Calling’, Alibaba trumpets the fact that “an Alibaba Cloud datacentre is coming to the UK”, although stops short of confirming a launch date.

Alibaba is not commenting further but the evidence does seem to have legs. It seems to suggest that Alibaba is gearing up from a real battle for the clouds in the UK.

Alibaba operates 18 cloud regions globally, 14 of which are in China and Asia-Pac. Two are situated in the US, a country Alibaba is reportedly struggling to crack. Its only European region, Frankfurt, serves continental European customers.

Featured products for the London region include flexible computing, storage, networking, database and security.

In its latest quarter ending 30 June 2018, Alibaba claims its cloud computing business grew by 93 percent year on year to $710 million.

 

Gartner purges half of cloud service providers from Magic Quadrant

Posted on June 1, 2018 by - News

lightning-cloudGartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service (IaaS), saw eight cloud service providers dropped from the rankings.

Virtustream, CenturyLink, Joyent, Rackspace, Interoute, Fujitsu, Skytap and NTT were all vanished from the analyst firm’s Magic Quadrant, leaving only the six largest companies.

The number cruncher’s reasons for this sudden purge was that it wanted to create a more “stringent inclusion criteria” this year, which effectively excludes all but global vendors who currently have IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.

This means Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure in the leaders’ box, with Alibaba, Oracle and IBM a long way behind.

“These changes reflect Gartner’s belief that customer evaluations are currently primarily focused on vendors for strategic adoption across a broad range of use cases. While customers still search for more focused, scenario-specific providers, these providers should be evaluated in the context of that specific workload, rather than compared in a broader market context”, according to the analyst firm.

 

Alibaba gets its own US cloud

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeAlibaba is launching a cloud computing hub in Silicon Valley which is the first that the e-commerce giant has set up outside of China.

The new California data centre marks the Chinese company’s latest expansion onto an US market dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Alibaba’s Aliyun cloud division intends the new data centre to cater initially to Chinese companies with operations in the United States. Later it will target US businesses seeking a presence in both countries.

Ethan Yu, a vice president at Alibaba who runs the international cloud business said that it was all part of Alibaba’s international expansion plans. The next stage would be a cloud on the East Coast, or somewhere in the middle of the US.

Aliyun is similar to Amazon Web Services and was part of the company’s in-house technical infrastructure. It has since expanded to lease processing and storage space for small and medium Internet businesses in China.

Aliyun, also known as Alibaba Cloud Computing, holds about a 23 percent market share in the Chinese market. It faces both Chinese and foreign competitors, from carriers like China Telecom to Microsoft and Amazon. Its existing data centers span the Chinese cities of Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

Yahoo plans to spin off AliBaba stake

Posted on January 28, 2015 by - News

Ali_Baba_and_the_Forty_ThievesYahoo plans to spin off its 15 percent stake in China’s Alibaba as shareholders demand that it hand over to shareholders the cash it has made from its  prized e-commerce investment.

The Alibaba shares are worth valued at roughly $40 billion.

Shares of Yahoo rose about seven percent to $51.45 in after hours trading on Tuesday, following the tax-free spinoff announcement and earnings which just beat analysts forecasts even as its revenues slightly lagged estimates.

Selling the Alibaba stake could pressure on Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to make quicker progress in strengthening Yahoo’s struggling media and advertising business.

Shareholders feel that Yahoo and its stake in Alibaba would be worth more separately, as long as the Alibaba shares are not subject to the standard 35 percent tax rate that would be incurred from selling the shares.

Yahoo is worth about $45 billion which includes its Alibaba stake of nearly $40 billion, meaning the current Yahoo share price assigns little value to the core business. Some investors believe the email, website and other operations are worth between $7 billion and $8 billion.

Mayer promised investors that the company’s display advertising revenue, which declined 4 percent in 2014, would return to growth this year. But the company’s forecast for revenue in the first quarter implied continuing problems.

Yahoo said that revenue, excluding fees paid to partner websites in the first quarter, would range from $1.02 billion to $1.06 billion, compared to the $1.09 billion last year.

Yahoo said its board of directors has authorized a plan to spin off the stake, tax-free, into a newly formed independent registered investment company. The stock of the company will be distributed pro-rata to Yahoo shareholders and the transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2015, Yahoo said.

The new entity will include Yahoo’s 384 million shares in Alibaba as well as an unspecified “legacy, ancillary” Yahoo business, the company said.

Yahoo’s revenue, excluding fees paid to partner websites, declined 1.8 percent year-on-year in the final three months of 2014 to $1.18 billion, just shy of Wall Street expectations.