Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud, speaks at the Computing Conference at National Convention Center on Aug. 9, 2016 in Beijing. (Photo : Getty Images)
Alibaba Group's partnerships with several well-known companies in the streaming sector were highlighted in the International Broadcasting Convention Expo (IBC Expo) held in Amsterdam last month, an article published in the streamingmedia.com said.
The partnerships were announced during the event, which focused on the integration of hardware and software services with Alibaba and its fast-growing cloud division, the company's first successful service to reach the U.S.
Known as AliCloud or Aliyun, the cloud computing division of Alibaba Group has been around since 2009 and it gained the attention of the business world when it opened its international data centers in Hong Kong in 2014, and in Silicon Valley in 2015, and moved its international headquarters from China to Singapore in the same year.
Meanwhile, Amazon has expanded into China, which has more than 1 billion consumers, as well as other areas of the Asia Pacific (APAC). Alibaba is considered a threat to the U.S. company, which sees AliCloud as a big challenge to its cloud business.
Amazon's move was not surprising when it announced in late 2013 that it is expanding its Amazon Cloud Service to China, since it was considered a move to pre-empt AliCloud.
Alibaba however, made two large investments to balance the playing field. In 2014, with $1 billion, AliCloud expanded to Dubai and move forward in the U.S. to compete with Amazon.
According to the report, Amazon is slightly way ahead of Alibaba Group in terms of its e-commerce offerings and much further away in web services. Amazon has almost 10 percent of the global cloud computing market, earning about $7.9 billion in revenues in 2015 while AliCloud only got $0.4 billion.
The Chinese cloud computing market is considered the potential market balancer, which posted a 45 percent compound annual growth rate between 2013 and 2015 and now accounts for about $3.1 billion in annual revenues.
AliCloud may have the potential to dominate the Chinese market if Amazon is not successful with its expansion. It would enable AliCloud to catch up with Amazon and would need less of the global computing market. Another advantage of Alibaba is that it is familiar with the APAC market.
