I am tracking AliYun / Alibaba Cloud for some time now. They are expanding internationally with strong pace. You would not ramp up that amount of Capex without sales momentum. I hear that Alibaba Cloud is gaining significant traction outside of China and offer a highly interesting solution for non-Chinese companies to provide services in China (even assisting their customers to obtain the necessary licenses). Their product portfolio in China is significantly larger than their international offering - but that is growing as well. I was at their Cloud conferences in Hangzhou twice in 2017 and 2016 and honestly I was blown away by the depth and quality of their portfolio. From AI / ML over cybersecurity to quantum computing they are doing the right moves. I remember impressive figures on their DDoS protection solution. And they can do IoT and.. and... and.... And their compute and storage platform is massively scalable. Just look up what levels of traffic Alibaba could handle on its ‚singles day‘ event (comparable to black friday and cyber monday - combined). So for me Alibaba Cloud definitely has the chops to become a global Top 3 player! Definitely comparable to AWS, GCP, Azure and a platform you should test. Happy to elaborate more - PM me.
Their cloud offering is a joke. Terrible UI. terrible on boarding.<p>It took me over 30 minutes of trying to deploy a small vps just to find out my account was locked out as a brand new user.<p>The moment they said to mail them a copy of government ID and the like I just closed my account and never looked back.<p>Don’t use them.
> <i>While the majority of its business is in China and Asia more broadly</i>, that is a huge market and gives Alibaba enough lift to grow fast and move up in the market more quickly. In another report from Synergy published last year, it found to no one’s surprise that the Chinese cloud market was dominated by Chinese cloud companies.<p>What are numbers to support that they have a big presence in Asian countries other than China? I checked the pdf it doesn't talk about country-wise segmentation.