American online retail giant Amazon announced back in mid-December 2013 that it will extend its cloud computing services – known as Amazon Web Services – in China. Amazon’s official announcement stated that the company will begin with a limited preview at the beginning of 2014.
Just a few hours before Amazon made the announcement, the cloud computing arm of the country’s e-commerce king Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Aliyun stated that it will reduce the price of its services by 35 percent. Even IBM stepped into the picture and announced that it is joining hands with a local partner in order to offer high-end smart cloud services to the country’s enterprise users.
With these recent announcements, it seems like the competition is heating up in China’s cloud computing sector. Evan Zeng, a Beijing-based analyst with Gartner Inc. – which is a US information technology research and advisory company – said, “Amazon Web Services is a quite mature cloud-computing service provider. It is expected to act as a catalyst in China’s cloud-computing industry. Its presence in China will not only bring healthy competition but will also help build up a better cloud-computing system”.
Amazon has managed to build up its business empire through e-commerce, but has never unveiled the size of its cloud computing business. It was revealed in August 2013 that the estimated revenue of the company was bigger than the combined sales of 14 other cloud service vendors.
Photo Credits: IB Times
