Alibaba Cloud launched its first data center in Indonesia on Thursday, catering a growing need for dependable, ascendible cloud services among small-to-mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the country.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited, the Chinese multinational eCommerce, retail, Internet, AI, and technology conglomerate, is expanding its cloud computing business in Asia’s growing economies by building local data centers, aiming to surpass U.S. rivals like Amazon.
“We are focusing on SMEs,” said Indonesia’s communications and information minister Rudiantara. He said the country has more than 15 million SMEs, calling them a key force in Indonesia’s economy
SMEs need cloud technology to drive more growth. We also encourage Indonesian businesses in every other sector to use cloud services, as our market is more challenging compared to China as an archipelagic country. A better infrastructure will help the SMEs across Indonesia, helping them widen their markets as well as improve our economy.
Alibaba Cloud said its local data center would provide a full cloud portfolio including compute, database, networking, and security services and help Indonesian businesses with low latency or data residency requirements to store and process data within the country.
It also singled out its MaxCompute big data platform that can store and process large amounts of structured data in the terabyte or even petabyte range, so businesses can quickly reap the benefits of data analytics and machine learning.
The newly opened data center will bring Alibaba one step closer to filling its commitment to support the Indonesian government’s effort to create 1,000 startups by 2020.
With the launch of the Alibaba Indonesia data center, Alibaba Cloud now has 18 locations worldwide, including Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Germany.
