Fresh off of last week's partnership with Aryaka, Alibaba Cloud announced it was working with Equinix to bolster its worldwide presence.
By partnering with Equinix, Alibaba Cloud will have access to 17 markets around the world, including Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as U.S. cities such as Chicago, Dallas, Texas and Denver.
Using Platform Equinix, Alibaba Cloud, which serves as the data backbone of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, now has access to more than 9,700 customers, including 1,800 network providers and close to 3,000 cloud and IT service providers globally.
In addition to gaining access to Equinix' partners, Equinix said Alibaba Cloud will also be able to improve its performance, lower latency and increase reliability for its customers.
As part of the partnership, Alibaba Cloud has integrated its API with Equinix's ECX Fabric. ECX Fabric is an on-demand, software-defined enabled interconnection service. According to Gartner, Alibaba Cloud is the third-largest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider.
RELATED: Aryaka to provide SD-WAN for Alibaba Cloud
Last week, Alibaba Cloud tapped Aryaka to provide fully managed SD-WAN services to its customers inside and outside China. It was the first global SD-WAN partnership for China’s largest public cloud provider.
Equinix is far and away the colocation market leader and one of the biggest spenders in that space. Over the past five years, the biggest deals to close were the acquisitions of Interxion and DuPont Fabros by Digital Realty, the acquisition of Global Switch by a group of Chinese investors and the acquisitions of Verizon data centers and Telecity by Equinix, according to Synergy Research Group (SRG.)
Over the 2015-2020 period, the largest investors, by a wide margin, have been Digital Realty and Equinix, which are the world’s two leading colocation providers. In aggregate they accounted for 35% of total deal value over the period. SRG has previously said it expects 2020 to be a bumper year for data center M&A activity.
As part of their digital transformations, enterprises and organizations of all stripes have been migrating their services and applications to clouds such as Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Alibaba Cloud, among others. Digital transformations have accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic as businesses see the value of being able to pivot their services and applications to the cloud.