Alibaba Cloud’s expansion outside of China and Asia Pacific has been well documented – and now the provider is firming up its commitments with the launch of a new EMEA partner program.

The partner program will aim to look at four key areas; developing digital transformation in targeted vertical industries; supporting the development of talent; advancing technology innovation; and enhancing marketplaces.

The overall effect, in the company’s words, is ‘to create an inclusive ecosystem that can benefit all those involved’. What this means is the support of companies such as Intel and Accenture, as well as Station F, the world’s largest startup campus.

“Our goal in EMEA is to bring powerful and elastic cloud services to our customers and create a well-connected, comprehensive ecosystem with our partners to accelerate cloud technology development in the regional cloud industry,” said Yeming Wang, Alibaba Cloud EMEA general manager in a statement.

Speaking to this publication back in May, Wang noted the changing landscape as key to Alibaba Cloud’s proposed expansion. Not only is it a global strategy from the whole Alibaba group, but there are political and technological ramifications – from China opening its doors to outside trade more on the one hand, to a rise in multi-cloud initiatives on the other.

“Today, we have a lot of clients asking to adopt Alibaba as a second or third public cloud provider,” said Wang. “Alibaba Cloud, from a user experience point of view, is quite similar to AWS. That is why we got comments from different clients – they say ‘if the guys are AWS certified or [an] AWS expert, then you’re halfway to being very familiar with Alibaba also.’”

Amazon is certainly the target for Alibaba globally. According to the latest note from analyst firm Synergy Research, AWS leads across all geographies, with Microsoft and Google comprising the top three everywhere instead of Asia Pacific, where Alibaba is second.