The latest contender on the cloud market is Chinese-owned Alibaba. Gartner data currently shows that Alibaba has a higher market share than Google, but is still considerably lower than Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
Alibaba’s cloud proposition is increasingly attractive to Chinese companies wanting to go global, as well as other businesses that want to break into the Chinese market. The key difference is the one thing that none of the US giants have a share of just yet: China.
In a recent survey of 400 Senior IT decision-makers, Alibaba was the least trusted tech brand when it came to handling company data and was trusted by a meagre 3% of the US and European firms.
The likes of Microsoft, Google, and Oracle will point to the fact that Alibaba does not have a SaaS (software-as-a-service) presence offering full package cloud computing services. Similarly, this has also been a criticism of Amazon Web Services.
Many large businesses have already begun relying on one of the big three US cloud giants when it comes to moving more of their IT infrastructure off-premise. While it may not be a forever deal, the likelihood of them moving over to a new provider is small.
John Lewis, for example, is a Google Cloud Platform user. Waitrose, which is part of the company, was an Amazon Web Services customer before a decision was made to combine the company’s IT. Therefore, the company has used two of the big cloud providers already, meaning Alibaba would have to provide something special to be considered.
If other providers are thinking in the same way, Alibaba will still be reaching to make it to the big three. However, that doesn’t mean they can’t compete and build other unique elements in the next few years. The next few years will showcase whether they have the chance to enter the US and European leagues, becoming the next global cloud provider.
https://kinsta.com/blog/google-cloud-vs-aws/
https://cloud.google.com/docs/compare/aws
