Dive Brief:
- China-based cloud provider Alibaba announced its partnership with U.S.-based open-source solutions company Red Hat on Thursday. Red Hat software will be available on the Alibaba Cloud in a matter of months.
- Alibaba will have a "pay-as-you-go" subscription model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. The Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program allows Red Hat users and independent software vendors to use its products in partnered public clouds.
- Red Hat is already partnered with U.S.-based cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft and Google, according to Fortune. Red Hat is extending its global cloud partnerships to reaffirm its "commitment to providing greater choice in the cloud," according to the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Red Hat is already used in many organizations and Alibaba is sure to attract more international customers. Alibaba is working to expand its international customer base, but there are limitations, especially AWS' stature as an already established, global cloud. Alibaba nevertheless wants to overthrow AWS' lead by 2019.
The cloud market is said to be worth about $246.8 billion in 2017, and over half of enterprises use more than one cloud provider. In many ways, this is a strong entrance point for Alibaba into the American market. The company is considered one of the "visionaries" in Gartner's IaaS magic quadrant, in close competition with IBM and Oracle.
Alibaba is already seeing consistent, strong growth, and its Q1 revenue jumped 96% year-over-year. Microsoft Azure grew 97% year-over-year in Q2, far surpassing AWS' 42% in the same time period. Alibaba credits new products for easy migration for part of its Q1 growth, and its Red Hat partnership is sure to extend its customer base.