Announced as the official cloud provider for the Olympics in January of this year, Alibaba Cloud has already caught the attention of many as a potential new challenger to the major cloud providers. Gartner placed it in the Visionaries section of their magic quadrant, confirming what many had already believed to be true about the perceived trajectory of the China-based cloud provider. However, those lofty aspirations maybe be exactly that; the wish of a small company to compete with the larger players on the global cloud arena.
Alibaba Cloud was the fastest growing cloud provider last year, topping out AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. That’s not hard to believe when you factor in the 113% year-over-year growth and 23% average quarterly growth observed over the past weeks. Still, it’s important to remember that percentage growth is easier at smaller scale, and so far, the new contender is not quite on par with Google Cloud, perceived by many to be the weakest of the major providers.
Despite this, Alibaba Cloud is clearly on the rise. This quarter they jumped IBM Cloud in market share, the effects of the deliberate expansion the company has been undergoing. However, one major area to consider is where Alibaba’s strength is centralized. While Alibaba could be considered near in size to other providers, much of their infrastructure and investment is located in asia. This could be both an advantage and a disadvantage for the provider, but it is undoubtable that they will need to grow their strength and presence in other regions if they want to compete with AWS, something the company has previously stated is a goal.
This week the Liftr Index will begin displaying metrics for Alibaba Cloud, after months of data scraping and research on how the new rival measures up to the other major providers. The detailed findings of that research will become available in the coming weeks here at Liftr News, but in the meantime, check out Alibaba Cloud’s scores on the Liftr Index.
