How does Alibaba Cloud compete with AWS, Microsoft and Google in EMEA?

Alibaba Cloud is continuing a push out of China into the EMEA market that started around 18 months ago. Computerworld UK sat down with the Alibaba Cloud EMEA GM Yeming Wang to discuss the firm's strategy for disrupting a highly competitive cloud computing market.

The cloud computing division of the $500 billion Chinese technology giant is not that different to its western rivals - Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) - in that it offers a broad range of cloud computing services, from basic infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities like elastic computing, storage and database solutions, to application services and advanced analytics capabilities like machine learning.

Alibaba Cloud was launched in 2009 and supports some of the biggest internet companies on the planet – although you probably have never used them. Both the ecommerce giant Alibaba and fintech app Ant Financial boast more than 500 million active users.

Alibaba Cloud has seven availability zones in China alone, seven more across Asia Pacific and Hong Kong, two in the US, one in Dubai, and one in Frankfurt for Europe. It also now has local teams in four EMEA locations: the UK, Germany, France and Dubai.

Alibaba Cloud is well poised to disrupt the big three public cloud providers for a few key reasons, EMEA general manager Yeming Wang told Computerworld UK at Alibaba Cloud's London office opposite the Savoy hotel.