Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba opens data centre in Australia

Since China is the largest trading partner of Australia, it is not surprising that Alibaba Cloud, which is part of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, chose Sydney as one of the four locations it opened a data centre. The presence of Alibaba Cloud, or Aliyun, in Australia would facilitate doing business with China for small and medium Australian enterprises because of Alibaba’s strength and scale in the Chinese market.

The three other Alibaba Cloud data centre which Aliyun opened are in Germany, Japan and Dubai. The four new centres brings to eight the total number since Alibaba Cloud has existing centres in China Hong Kong, Singapore and the US, The Australian reports.

Other than the data centre, Alibaba has also opened an office in Melbourne to promote the company’s e-business. Ethan Yu, general manager of the Alibaba Cloud’s global business, says the new data centre in Sydney would help the firm serve better the needs of its current clients expanding globally and need scalable and secure cloud computing services.

He points out that Aliyun clients could manage their infrastructure in various regions using only one Alibaba Cloud account, says Yu. He says Aliyun is the perfect vendor to provide service to an Australian enterprise seeking to set up an ecommerce portal that would serve the Australian market, Middle East and China where the company has facilities in these locations, ZDNet reports.

Besides cloud computing services, Alibaba also rolled out in August AliLaunch which helps partners overcome commercial and technological barriers international companies go through when expanding in China.

However, ZDNet points out that compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba Cloud’s physical presence is limited since AWS has 35 availability zones and 13 regional globally, plus new regions in Canada, China, Ohio and the UK would soon become online. But Alibaba’s e-commerce site has a wider market as proven by the $17.7 billion (A$24 billion) worth of transactions that Aliyun processed on Nov 11, China’s Singles’ Day.