A new hybrid cloud solution from Alibaba Cloud will help China’s largest cloud service provider better serve enterprise customers that need to keep some workloads within private data centres for compliance, data residency, or latency reasons. The new solution, which will debut in mainland China by the end of 2022 before being offered in international markets next year, could also help Alibaba Cloud compete more effectively against major cloud rivals in the fast-growing Asia Pacific market, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Although Alibaba Cloud is China’s largest cloud service provider, it lags behind these three US-based cloud companies in other parts of Asia Pacific, a region that Alibaba Cloud has prioritized for significant business expansion. In addition to being major providers of public cloud services, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all offer versions of their respective cloud platforms that can be run inside private, on-premise data centres.
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Alibaba Cloud’s new hybrid cloud solution is built on the company’s CloudBox appliance, a managed, on-premise edge computing solution, which combines computing, storage, and networking capabilities. First announced in 2019, CloudBox is used by financial institutions, retailers, and other enterprises to process and analyze data close to where it is generated. The new hybrid cloud version of CloudBox will enable enterprises to run a dedicated Alibaba Cloud region in on-premise data centres spanning multiple availability zones. It is therefore similar to Oracle’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer hybrid cloud offering. Customers will have access to over 50 Alibaba Cloud services within their own data centres.
Alibaba Cloud’s strategy to ensure the competitiveness of its new hybrid cloud solution vis-à-vis alternatives from other major cloud service providers involves maximizing flexible consumption options for customers. It also includes helping customers evaluate their cloud use and plan the migration of workloads to cloud data centres. To address the commercial aspects of its new hybrid cloud solution, Alibaba Cloud has said it will work out a specific operating model with each customer individually. The company also offers customers a cloud-native assessment model to help them evaluate their cloud use and a migration tool to help them plan their cloud migrations and calculate and forecast the total cost of ownership of their cloud investments.
GlobalData predicts that between 2021 and 2026 demand for hybrid cloud solutions from across the Asia Pacific region will grow by 12.8%, to reach a total market size of $34.6 billion in 2026. Demand in China will increase by 14.9% over the same period to reach $8.25 billion. As it focuses on capturing some of this demand, Alibaba Cloud will need to face intense competition from a raft of cloud competitors including AWS, Google, Oracle, Huawei and Tencent.
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