How Alibaba Cloud has moved up the ranks to become a cloud leader – with global expansion key

The rise of Alibaba Cloud, to become a major player in cloud infrastructure, is a fascinating one. Between 2014 and 2016, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) saw the top right box change not one iota. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was out on its own, followed by Microsoft, then a gap to the rest. 2014 had a swarm of ‘visionary’ players, but by 2016 only Google remained to take third place. Last year, however, things changed. The top right of course remained the same, but alongside IBM and Oracle – a fellow debutant and another company who has recently speculated to accumulate in this space – Alibaba Cloud joined Google in the visionaries category. Crucially, Alibaba placed highest out of the three in terms of ability to execute. Indeed the analyst firm, in a separate study, put Alibaba in third place for public cloud IaaS back in September. Why the change? The rise reflects Alibaba Cloud’s push for expansion outside China – and as Yeming Wang (left), general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe explains, it’s a plan for the whole of Alibaba Group as well. “To go global is definitely a corporate level of strategy,” he tells CloudTech.