Alibaba Cloud lands in Brazil
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group, will be offering its services in Brazil.
AliCloud will be represented by Brazilian cloud computing firm UOL Diveo as its channel partner in the country.
According to the companies, the idea is to provide a springboard for Brazilian and Chinese companies looking to develop their digital businesses in both countries.
"I believe that this partnership will bring the two countries closer together, which is fundamental for Brazilian companies wanting to enter the Chinese market and Chinese companies that want to offer their services and products in the Brazilian market," said the chief executive at UOL Diveo, Gil Torquato.
"With the established presence of UOL Diveo in the Brazilian market, we believe that together we are able to help our customers achieve their digital transformation needs," said the head of channels at Alibaba Cloud Americas, Hao Lin.
Alibaba is the top cloud provider in Asia, but globally competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Cloud computing represents 7% of Alibaba's total group revenue.
Last month, Alibaba reported cloud computing revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter was $1.15 billion, up 76 percent from a year ago, as customers spent more on new services.
Migration of systems to cloud environments is a key priority for IT decision makers in Brazil as a means to resume innovation initiatives, with 80 percent of local C-level executives seeing it as a priority, according to a study by analytics firm SAS.
A separate study by IT services firm Logicalis also indicated that the mixed approach of on-premise, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services is also seeing an increase in Brazil , even though the private cloud approach is still favored by most IT decision makers in the country.