TechinAsia reported that Alibaba, China’s ecommerce titan, seems to really like Singapore. Just over a month after Alibaba made a follow-up investment in SingPost (the two injections total US$456 million), the company today announced a major new cloud data center and a “headquarters of international business” in Singapore. Ethan Yu, VP of Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing division, tells Tech in Asia that Alibaba already had a base and some staff in Singapore following earlier moves into the country, such as the launch of a Southeast Asia spin-off of its Taobao marketplace in 2013. Now, with the new data center which comes online in early September, Alibaba didn’t have enough office space – and “not enough people to support the Aliyun expansion,” he explains. Yu isn’t sure of the headcount in Singapore, but the number is up as Alibaba renews its interest in the country.
The new Aliyun data center in Singapore will see Alibaba once again take on other cloud services, like Amazon’s AWS or Softlayer, in the battle to get major companies and startups to entrust them with powering their web services. The new Singapore data center will come online alongside four locations in mainland China, and one each in Hong Kong and Silicon Valley. Yu says Aliyun – which now claims to have 1.8 million corporate customers – chose Singapore because “we follow our customers.” With two-thirds of China’s outbound investment going to Southeast Asia, the firm sees Singapore as a hub for the diverse region that’s home to over 600 million people. The new data center wants to power the web services of Chinese companies as they expand to Southeast Asia. “The local, domestic market is exploding as well,” Yu explains. “The cloud markets of Southeast Asia [plus] Australia are growing very rapidly in recent years.” So Aliyun is out to entice new customers in the fast-growing region.
Now that Alibaba is quite well known around the world after its blockbuster IPO, the Aliyun crew hopes the service now has more street cred. “We’re not actually Aliyun alone – we’re the cloud infrastructure within the Alibaba group. Which means our infrastructure is very fine, and tested on one of the biggest ecommerce platforms in the world, by Taobao, by Tmall, and also by one of the biggest epayment gateways, Alipay.” Startups are one niche area that Alibaba is looking at in the region. Aliyun’s Founder+ program, which was established earlier this year in China, will be expanded to Southeast Asia to give startups discounted or free resources, including guidance and useful connections to major investors – all things that might sweeten the deal to get entrepreneurs to sign up for Aliyun’s cloud computing horsepower.
With only about 10 percent of IT budgets spent on cloud computing in the region, Yu sees plenty of room for growth in the market – and plenty of room for two giants like Alibaba and Amazon to butt heads. Because Alibaba’s data centers power its own services as well as third-party clients who sign up for it, the cloud center is a giant, whirring warning that Alibaba has even greater ecommerce ambitions for Southeast Asia than its earlier, tentative moves suggest. Yu says there will “definitely” be more Alibaba products popping up in Southeast Asia soon, but there’s no word on which ones. “I think our next step will be to get to know the market better,” he adds.
Source: TechInAsia
