"Alibaba, the world's largest and possibly most valuable e-commerce site worth between $150 and $250 Billion, announced its new Hong Kong datacenter just days after filing for its IPO in the United States.
Jack Ma (Ma Yun) Executive Chairman of Alibaba & Soon-to-be China's Richest Man
Alibaba may be the Amazon of the east, but do not just think of the company as ""just"" an e-commerce marketplace. Alibaba Group Holding is now offering some of the most high-level technology cloud services as any tech giant, and most importantly it's offering itsclients data hosting.
Plus, along with the IPO of the technology giant comes a wave of other eastern companies like JD.com - all with the focus of not only making goods available outside of China, but building their fledging cloud-based services.
The company launched its data storage services back in 2009, and although the cloud-computing unit of the company is tiny (a mere"" $90 Million - 1.4% of its total revenue from the last 9-months in 2013 - yes Alibaba is that big) when compared to its e-commerce business, the IPO should shine the limelight onto the company's data management services in the future.
In order to combat the need for future data storage, Alibaba, is hedging its bets and building a data center to house all the data (from the company and clients) that it can.
The data center announcement also follows Alibaba's desire to expand its two main shopping sites: Taobao and Tmail, outside of mainland China and into Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
Although the company has not made a comment as to the cost of the datacenter itself, it's a joint venture with Towngas, a leading Hong Kong gas company.
For months, since last year's speculation that Alibaba would file for IPO in the U.S., analysts have been closely watching this ground-breaking IPO, and it could be the biggest IPO the technology world has ever seen.
So, why all the fanfare for going public in the United States, Edith Yeung (vice president of international business development at Dolphin, an Android mobile browser) quipped:
""In general, the Chinese (like everyone else) have this American dream'”they want to go public in the United States. It's not as cool if you go public in China.""
The Future is Now: Alibaba's New Data Center is Under Construction
So, keep your eye on Alibaba and for all things datacenter-related, please visit www.datacenters.com or call one of our data center specialists at (877) 406-2248."
