Alibaba’s cloud expansion continues: the company has announced an expansion into Turkey alongside E-Glober.

E-Glober, the only authorised agent and business partner of Alibaba.com in Turkey, will provide their local connections and insights with Alibaba Cloud’s global infrastructure to ‘provide a compelling offering to meet the digitalisation and international expansion needs of local companies’, as the press materials put it.

Alibaba is pushing its Elastic Compute Service (ECS) with this, citing an IDC study which found the public cloud market was worth almost $97 million in 2017. The company also sees Turkey as a ‘gateway’ nation between the East and the West.

Last month, Alibaba Cloud opened data centre facilities in Indonesia, while in February the company chose Mobile World Congress – its stand proclaiming the company was the fastest growing cloud provider in the world – as the basis for several pieces of Europe-focused product news. These included announcements around infrastructure, big data and artificial intelligence (AI), and a hybrid cloud services platform.  

“Alibaba Cloud has always been dedicated to making our future-proof technology inclusive within the markets in which we operate,” said Yeming Wang, deputy general manager of Alibaba Cloud Global in a statement. “We aim to become the preferred cloud service provider for all sizes of business in Turkey by providing a full range of cloud solutions and combining this with E-Glober’s local expertise.

“Working with knowledgeable and well-connected local partners such as E-Glober will help mitigate language and cultural barriers, as well as reinforce Alibaba Cloud’s foothold within the market when it comes to helping Turkish companies internationalise and seize opportunities in this digital age,” he added.