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One of the most dominant online shopping companies, Amazon.com Inc. has formally announced last month that the company will introduce its cloud-computing services, the Amazon Web Services, to China. A limited preview of the system will start early this year.
Several hours before the official announcement from Amazon, the cloud-computing arm of the dominant Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Aliyun, has released a public statement that it will reduce the price of its online services by 35 percent. A similar announcement was also done by IBM a few hours later. Jumping into the bandwagon, IBM has issued a statement that it will collaborate with a local partner to provide better quality cloud-computing services.
Apparently, the series of public announcements of several computer technology companies was part of a pre-emptive strike to be more competitive with the Amazon Web Services. It seems that a formal business war started with the aim of dominating the cloud computing sector. On the other hand, Amazon has clarified that it does not intend to cut a big share of the potential market but simply wants to level out the overall cloud computing services in China.
As a globally dominant and mature provider of cloud-computing services, Amazon will inevitably catalyze the competition in the cloud-computing industry of China. Amazon will usher healthy business competition that will lead to highly improved system. This is the opinion of a Beijing-based analyst who is currently working for a U.S. information technology and research advisory company, the Gartner Inc.
According to research conducted by Gartner last year, Amazon has an estimated total revenue that is larger than the combined revenues of the 14 companies that offer cloud-computing services, which include IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp. Amazon is a company that largely built it's e-commerce empire, has not fully revealed the size of its cloud-computing business, but the most conservative estimates reveal that Amazon is the most dominant company in this industry on a global scale.
