Alibaba Cloud Eco Summit India 2018

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group is China's largest provider of public cloud services and the fourth largest global player in the IaaS market (by revenue) in 2017.

The brand is now planning to foray in to the Indian market to capture the growing IT services market in the region.

Alex Li, General Manager, Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud, spoke about the massive growth projections in the global public cloud market. He pointed out that the global revenue is projected to grow 21.4% in 2018, while India's public cloud services revenue is slated to increase to $2.5 billion, about 37.5% in 2018, from $1.8 billion in 2017.

He said, Alibaba Cloud will be targeting technology and private sector market in India, soon to be followed by the Public sector. He seems to be quite optimistic about the opportunities available in the public sector for Alibaba Cloud, the way it has been successful in similar sectors in other markets like Singapore, Australia & China.

Alibaba Cloud has already partnered with HCL, making it the key distributing partner in India and is in talks with over 100 partners to grow its market in India. They are focusing on Business partners, technology and distributing partners as well. To support these, the brand is also intending to identify Consulting and Training partners. In addition, Li mentioned that Alibaba is planning to setup training programs where over 1000 new hires are expected to be trained.

Also speaking about the competition in the market, especially from AWS, he said that he is quite aware of the strong competition in the market but also confident that Alibaba cloud is going to overcome this soon.

When asked about whether there is any infrastructure of Alibaba for datacentre in India, he said currently there are none but there are plans for setting up Datacentres in India. He also added that they are planning to add R&D departments in India, keeping Bengaluru, Mumbai & Delhi as the main hub for their setups and businesses.