Alibaba to open cloud data centres in Indonesia, India
Alibaba's cloud computing unit will open two new data centres in Indonesia and India as part of efforts to expand its footprint in the region.
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To be located in Jakarta and Mumbai, the new sites were expected to be ready before the end of the company's fiscal year, ending March 31, 2018. These would push Alibaba Cloud's data centre footprint to 17 locations worldwide, including Singapore, Japan, Australia, Germany, and its domestic Chinese market.
The announcement followed recent plans to build a distribution and data centre in Malaysia, said Alibaba Cloud Friday at its Computing Conference in Shanghai. It added that its increased resources in Asia would enable the company to better support small and midsize businesses in the region.
The new sites in Indonesia and India would provide "a full suite of" cloud services, according to Alibaba, which added that it would be the first global cloud vendor to set up an international cloud data centre in Indonesia. The launch would be in line with the Indonesian government's "1,000 Start-ups Movement" scheme to support 1,000 companies by 2020, with the goal to reach a combined valuation of US$10 billion, Alibaba said.
The Chinese vendor added that it had partnered Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) in India, which was a subsidiary of local telco Reliance Communications, to provide customers direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect via GCX's Cloud X Fusion platform.
In addition, Alibaba's partnership with Tata Communications would offer similar access to the former's cloud services via the Indian provider's IZOTM Private Connect offering.
Alibaba in May reported a 56 percent increase in revenue to US$22.99 billion for its fiscal 2017, fuelled in part by strong growth in its cloud business, which revenue climbed 121 percent to US$968 million. Its paying cloud customer base grew 70 percent to 874,000, although, the business unit reported an operating loss of US$73 million for the quarter, on adjusted EBITA loss of US$24 million. It closed the year with a loss of 1.68 billion yuan (US$244 million), improving on last year's operating loss of 2.61 billion yuan (US$378.1 million).