Clash of the Titans: Alibaba sets up data centre in Singapore to rival Amazon in the cloud

Just weeks after announcing its plans to make a foray into the cloud computing market, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding said it was “ on track ” to open its data centre in Singapore in September. The Singapore data centre will serve customers in Southeast Asia.

Alibaba, which will invest $1 billion in the next three years into its Aliyun cloud computing arm and set up data centres in the Middle East, Singapore, Japan and Europe, hopes “ to overtake Amazon (AWS division) in four years, whether that’s in customers, technology, or worldwide scale. ” [caption id=“attachment_2073127” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Reuters[/caption] As it expands, Aliyun will face stiff competition from some of the biggest names in technology. Amazon led the global cloud infrastructure market with a 28 percent share in 2014, trailed by Microsoft, IBM and Google Inc at 10, 7 and 5 percent, respectively, according to Synergy Research Group. The Singapore facility is the second overseas data centre to be opened this year by Aliyun, as the business unit expands internationally. Aliyun launched its first overseas data center in Silicon Valley in March. The cloud computing arm as of June 30 counted 1.8 million customers, including major Chinese companies and public agencies. The Singapore data centre—Aliyun’s seventh overall—will provide a range of cloud services to companies operating in Southeast Asia with an initial focus on Chinese businesses, according to Aliyun. “When it opens next month, the centre will be networked with the company’s existing centres in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Silicon Valley,” the company announced in a blog post. In addition to hosting the data centre, Singapore will also become the headquarters for Aliyun’s overseas operations, the company said. Alibaba sees cloud computing as an important new revenue source as it capitalises on its extensive Internet and data-storage infrastructure to provide cloud services to other companies in China and abroad. Alibaba said revenues from cloud computing and Internet infrastructure increased 106 percent year-on-year in the quarter ended June 30 and 82 percent compared with results from the prior quarter. Although not scheduled to open until September, Aliyun’s Singapore facility is already allowing companies to pre-order “elastic” cloud services, computer resources such as processing power, storage and network bandwith that can be scaled up and down to meet user demand. Additional offerings planned to become available in September will include relational database services; server load balancing; cloud-based data caching and storage; storage and real-time access to mass structured data; and security services such as protection against hacking and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.