Alibaba is reportedly trying to cement its cloud business with plans to open a data center in India this year.
According to Indian newspaper Business Line, China's e-commerce titan has plans to boost its cloud computing business in India likely through an acquisition.
"When they start on-boarding millions of sellers and suppliers on the platform, it is clear they will need a means to support that kind of data," said Greyhound Research's CEO Sanchit Vir Gogia in an interview with Business Line. "It is less expensive compared to relying on a third-party data center and also there are no issues of data theft."
The move is now seen as an attempt to shake the presence of Microsoft and Amazon, two of Alibaba's biggest competitors in cloud computing, in the Indian market, added the newspaper.
Microsoft has already established its cloud business in the country through Azure, while the Amazon Web Services has been targeting the Indian space for its AWS infrastructure region since last year, reported Business Insider.
Alibaba is no stranger to India as it has investments in online shopping platform Snapdeal and mobile payment firm Paytm.
Struggling to make itself known in developed markets' cloud computing arena, however, Alibaba seems to be finding new opportunities in other economies, a strategy that is being adopted by its top rivals. The company's big push for cloud computing is not surprising.
Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing arm, recorded 175 percent year-on-year growth for its 4Q financial results. The subsidiary's paying customers now exceed 500,000.
According to a report by TechWeek Europe, Aliyun is now the highest growth business unit for Jack Ma's empire.
"[It is] clear AliCloud has big ambitions," Aliyun's Simon Hu was quoted as saying in the TechWeek report. "Taking on a worldwide cloud market worth billions of pounds in revenues, AliCloud is entering a tough competitive bazaar with its SaaS and IaaS services, AWS hauled in revenues of around $6 billion last year, and dominates the public cloud space around the world with a potential run rate of $10 billion for 2016."