GlobalData: Alibaba Cloud Closes the Gap on Competitors in Asia-Pacific Region

Alibaba Cloud is poised to close the gap with its rivals — namely global cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and IBM — as it expands outside of China into the Asia-Pacific region, according to research and analytics firm GlobalData.The firm predicted that an “insatiable trend” of cloud provider product launches will grow the cloud services market in Asia Pacific at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.7 percent to $55.3 billion in 2022, up from $16.2 billion in 2017. Siow Meng Soh, a GlobalData technology analyst, called Alibaba Cloud “a force to be reckoned with” in the region. “It has a strong presence and mindshare in China where it has almost 50 percent of the IaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service] market share,” Soh said, noting that the other cloud providers have had a tougher time penetrating the market in China due to political and regulatory reasons.In the recent months, Alibaba Cloud has been working to take its services overseas, particularly out of China and into Southeast Asian markets, and has named a number of key partnerships, including with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), ElasticSearch, VMware, and Intel.