Alibaba's cloud revenues continue to skyrocket as the China-based cloud services provider (CSP) seeks to counter Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure.
Indeed, Alibaba's cloud revenues were US$1.1 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2019, up 66 percent vs. the corresponding quarter last year, the company disclosed this morning.
Alibaba launched 300 new cloud products and features during the quarter, mostly involving security, data intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, the company say.
The next big bet involves Alibaba Cloud SaaS Accelerator, a solution and online marketplace that helps SaaS partners to build, launch and commercialize their offerings. The company announced the marketplace in the June 2019 quarter as a counter to AWS Marketplace.
Public Cloud Market Share: Gartner IaaS Research
In terms of market share, Alibaba commanded about 7.7 percent of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud market in 2018, according to Gartner. That trailed both AWS (47.8 percent) and Microsoft Azure (15.5 percent), but led both Google (4.0 percent) and IBM (1.8 percent).
Most of Alibaba's cloud momentum is in Asia. The company has been pushing into Europe, but has yet to make a major U.S. push -- perhaps because of potential U.S. regulatory concerns and/or fierce entrenched competition from AWS and Azure.
Alibaba vs Amazon On All Fronts
Cloud services are only one part of the larger Alibaba business -- which is a massive e-commerce provider in China much in the way that Amazon's online store dominates North America.
Alibaba's overall financial results for the latest quarter included:
- Quarterly revenue was US$16.7 billion, up 42 percent vs. the corresponding quarter last year.
- Net income of US$2.8 billion.
