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It’s official: IBM is going partnership mad. A couple of months after announcing a huge mobility collaboration with Apple, and only a week after inking a deal with Twitter for enterprise social analytics, Big Blue has announced a deal with Chinese Internet provider Tencent for cloud software.

The goal is to enable Chinese industries to provide public cloud with software as a service (SaaS), to utilise mobile, cloud computing and big data tools. It also gives IBM an interesting business angle in China.

“The industry dimension makes this especially appealing for businesses,” said Nancy Thomas, managing partner with IBM business consulting services in China. “IBM and Tencent’s shared vision is not only to bring the scale and cost benefits of cloud computing to enterprises in China, but to add differentiating value by serving the particular needs of specific industries.

“That is the key to unlocking the transformative power of cloud computing.”

China remains a very interesting market for cloud vendors to penetrate. CenturyLink, best known as a telco but weighing its options in the cloud space, offers a managed hosting facility in China, launched last month.

Similar to IBM CenturyLink is partnering up, this time going with Neusoft. Amazon Web Services launched a Chinese region in December last year, patterning with various local providers including ChinaNetCenter and SINNET.

A report released last year on the state of cloud computing in China found that “systematic” weaknesses in Chinese infrastructure were key to the region not fulfilling its potential as a cloud IT power. Amazon, CenturyLink and IBM among others have started partnering up and moving over – which can only be good news for Chinese IT.