Alibaba Launches First Cloud Data Center In India

In an attempt to expand its fast and quickly growing economy, Alibaba launches its first cloud data center in India. According to reports, this China based firm will come online in January 2018 and will be based out of Mumbai.

Beyond offering the basic cloud based services, this new data center is also going to provide large scale computing, storage and big data capabilities. Further, this centre will give Indian customers access to elastic computing, database, storage and content delivery, networking, analytics and big data, containers, middleware, and security.

The new Alibaba data center will have 33 zones, spanning over regions like China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. This move comes in a fight against the likes of AWS, Microsoft, Azure and Google Cloud.

To make the services more streamlined, Alibaba has employed a group of local professionals. Interestingly, this is going in line with Alibaba’s work in helping small and medium sized businesses grow and generate more revenue. In the past, Alibaba has made major investments in three different companies in India. These include Paytm, TicketNew and BigBasket. The totality of these investments come up to about $ 1 billion.

Established in 2009, Alibaba has partnered with Global Cloud Xchange (GCX,) a subsidiary of Reliance Communications and Tata Communications (TCS.) GCX enables direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express via GCX’s CLOUD X Fusion. On the other hand, Tata Communications provides direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect through its  IZOTM Private Connect service.

“Indian enterprises are innovative and operating in growth sectors, and we look forward to empowering them through our cloud computing and data technologies. As we build out the Alibaba Cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is now firmly in place,” Simon Hu, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Group and president of Alibaba Cloud, said in a statement.