Alibaba Cloud expanding Data Centre footprint in India

Second data centre by end of Q3 2018. Third data centre by H1 2019

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group is rapidly expanding its footprint in India. The company plans to set up its second data center in the country in Mumbai by the end of the current quarter. With this, the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region will have two availability zones.

The Chinese firm’s first data centre in India was formally launched this year on 26th January 2018 (India’s 69th Republic Day) in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

The company’s modular data centre design facilitates on-demand expansion. Both data centres in Mumbai are expected to be within 50 km of each other enabling the company to have an active-active data center architecture. This is similar to how AWS has located multiple zones in Mumbai.

Alibaba Cloud will also set up a third data centre in the first half of 2019. The location of the third data centre is yet to be finalised. Setting up of a data centre, typically involves an investment of 20–30 million USD.

Dr. Alex Li, General Manager — Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud.

Chinese behemoth, Alibaba seeks to capture a significant market share in India, which is currently dominated by Western Cloud Service Providers — AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), Bluemix (IBM), Google Cloud and Digital Ocean among others.

“We grew 7 times last year in the APAC region. This year my target is a 10 x growth in the region,” said Dr. Alex Li, General Manager — Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud. He was speaking at Alibaba’s first Cloud Eco Summit organised in India in Bangalore.

Alibaba Cloud is present in 18 global regions across 45 availability zones. It is the first and only global public cloud platform with a data centre footprint in Malaysia. “We are soon going to launch in London and Central US,” he added.

Alibaba Cloud’s India operations are headquartered in Delhi. The firm is actively expanding its team in India. It is investing heavily in solution architects.

“Alibaba Cloud is committed to train 1000 professionals by March 2019,” said said Dr. Alex Li.

“We have already trained over 100 people over the last two weeks in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore,” said Vivek Gupta, Head & Director of Business Development, India & SAARC, Alibaba Cloud.

The company has launched its Tianchi Program in India — a global contest platform focussed on big data. This is a community of over 200,000 developers, over 3,400 academic institutes and business groups in 91 countries and regions.

The company has teamed up with Yourstory to launch a “Create @ Alibaba Cloud Start-up Contest”, where winners will be selected through events across 3 cities.

Market Share of Public Cloud Providers.

Alibaba Cloud has a 47.6 percent market share in the Chinese Public Cloud Market. It is ranked number two, after AWS, in the APAC region. Globally, Alibaba Cloud is in the third position.

“We have a big plan in India. This is our next big market,” said Dr. Alex Li.

The company is in the process of building up a strong partner eco-system in India by teaming up with consulting agencies, system integrators, value added resellers and value added distributors. Today Alibaba Cloud appointed HCL Infosystems as an authorised national Value Added Distributor for India.

Alibaba Cloud’s Mumbai nodes have also deployed the latest version 2.0 of MaxCompute, its big data computing service. MaxCompute enables the user to store and process massive structured and unstructured data at the terabyte or even petabyte level.

In the aviation sector Alibaba Cloud has customers like Air Asia and Garuda (Indonesia). It is also working with Vistara in India.

The company is pursuing opportunities in the smart city segment in India. “The ‘City brain’ is already being used in China and Malaysia. We look forward to using it in India as well,” said Dr. Alex Li.

Alibaba has had a presence in India since 2008. It has made significant investments in India in companies like Paytm, Big Basket, Zomato, XpressBees and Snapdeal.