For the fourth year in a row, Alibaba ranked as the third largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the world and the biggest in the Asia Pacific in 2021 by revenue.
The latest Gartner report, Market Share: IT Services, 2021, showed Alibaba’s global market share expanded to 9.55 percent while its Asia Pacific share is 25.5 percent.
With 84 availability zones in 27 regions, Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, provides IT services to millions of customers globally. According to the 2021 report, the company was able to increase its individual worldwide market share across verticals, including transportation, banking and investment services, insurance, manufacturing and natural resources, and wholesale trade, with revenue growth between 49 percent and 67.5 percent for these sectors from a year earlier.
“Acting as the backbone for the digital transformation of a wide range of industries, IaaS is a key service for our business, and we are glad to be recognized for our continued growth in this area. Over the past year, our customers have sped up their cloud migrations to ensure business continuity against the ongoing impact of the pandemic across the world. We see this transition to cloud-based operations as necessary for business growth,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “Our commitment to supporting our global customers in these challenging times has helped us maintain a strong competitive position in the market. We will continue to deliver innovative products and services to drive the growth of the digital economy.”
The global IaaS market showed strong growth in 2021. According to the Gartner report, the IaaS market grew to US$90.89 billion from US$64.29 billion in 2020. The Asia Pacific recorded faster growth than the global average, with market revenues totaling US$33.16 billion.
Alibaba Cloud has been increasing its resources in strategic markets across the Asia Pacific. In the past year, the company’s data centers in Indonesia and the Philippines commenced operations. The company also announced the availability of its first data center in South Korea in March 2022.
Alibaba Cloud launched Project AsiaForward in 2021, pledging an initial US$1 billion in funding and resources to cultivate a million-strong digital talent pool, empower 100,000 developers and support the growth of 100,000 technology startups in the Asia Pacific.
To increase its product capabilities, Alibaba Cloud has launched an array of innovative solutions. For example, the fourth generation of ApsaraCompute Shenlong Architecture, unveiled in October 2021, has leading capabilities in container elasticity, storage, input/output (IO) performance, low latency and chip-level security hardening features. It is also equipped with the industry’s only large-scale Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which reduces network latency to as low as 5 microseconds.
Last year, Alibaba Cloud was also evaluated in the 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for Alibaba Cloud International IaaS & PaaS.
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