Alibaba Group and British Telecommunications (BT) Group are partnering on cloud services.
A spokeswoman from BT confirmed the deal through an email to Bloomberg. The details of the partnership were not shared. The talks are still running and there are no official announcements from both the companies. Spokesman from Alibaba Cloud declined to comment on the matter.
According to Bloomberg, the partnership between Alibaba and BT will challenge the dominance of Amazon in Europe. Alibaba Cloud, the cloud unit of Alibaba Group, will help BT to offer better cloud and big data services to its clients at low costs.
A person familiar with the matter further told Bloomberg that the deal between Alibaba and BT is similar to the existing partnership of Alibaba with Vodafone Group Plc in Germany.
Currently, Amazon Web Services dominate the cloud computing market globally, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Alibaba Cloud ranks fourth.
Alibaba Cloud is expanding globally over the years, and it has helped in propelling the growth of Alibaba. With the tensions between America and China escalated under President Donald Trump’s America First Agenda, Alibaba has pulled back from US market and is looking to target Europe.
In 2016, the Chinese tech giant partnered with Vodafone in Germany, to resell Alibaba Cloud services including data storage and analytics. Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud recently joined hands with France-based transport and communications company Bollore SA in cloud computing, bid data and artificial intelligence (AI).
Earlier this year at Mobile World Congress conference, Alibaba Cloud launched several new services in Europe, which were related to artificial intelligence, big data, infrastructure, and security.
Yeming Wang, the general manager of Alibaba Cloud Europe, had said that Alibaba Cloud wants to be an enabler for technology innovation in Europe to help enterprises do business.
Also read: Alibaba Cloud becomes Gold member of Cloud Foundry Foundation
