In addition to the announcement of its plans for building a cloud presence in India, Alibaba Cloud has today inked a partnership with Tata Communications to enable customers to connect to the former’s ‘ExpressConnect’ platform via the latter’s IZO Private Connect service.
This collaboration was announced at Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud Computing Conference in Shanghai this Saturday. It is particularly focused towards enterprise customers from over 150 countries, including India, who employ the services of Alibaba Cloud. This means global enterprises will now have immediate access to a secure connection between the Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), the Internet and end-users’ own networks.
Talking about the partnership, Yeming Wang, Deputy General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Global in a statement said:
We look forward to working closely with Tata Communications in a bid to provide an exciting proposition with great connectivity for global enterprises wanting to enter China and for Chinese enterprises looking to go global with ease and convenience.
The IZO Platform, designed to offer seamless user experience across the network, is a flexible, one-stop cloud enablement platform that helps you navigate complexity for more agile business performance. Connecting to Alibaba Cloud via the said gateway enables enterprise customers to scale their cloud connectivity and enable rapid provisioning of capacity to the same.
Tata Communications further mentions that 25 percent of the world’s Internet routes travel over the company’s network. It claims that it now has a prominent hold over the largest wholly-owned subsea cable network in the world — which is an important feat for the Tata conglomerate — currently sorting out its management troubles.
Genius Wong, President, Global Network, Cloud and Data Centre Services at Tata Communications comments on this partnership as under:
The partnership will assist both of us to become digital transformation partners for our customers, empowering them to expand to new geographies, boost productivity and safeguard their businesses against threats.
As for Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing subsidiary of the Chinese e-commerce behemoth, is known to provide customers access to products related to computing, database management, networking, security and storage that can be deployed globally. Following its arch-nemesis Amazon, who set up its first AWS center in Mumbai last year, Alibaba also plans to open its data center in India in the coming weeks. This will take the company’s total data center count, across the globe, to seventeen.
