As Chinese giant Alibaba expands its Aliyun cloud service worldwide, Equinix is helping out by providing connections through its Cloud Exchange locations in Hong Kong and Silicon Valley.

Alibaba announced a data center in Silicon Valley earlier this year, and a joint venture in Dubai. The direct conneciton deal with Equinix will help these sites offer a better service to the Chinese company’s target market, mostly Chinese firms with offices abroad.

Network help

Alibaba wants to offer public and hybrid cloud services to multi-national enterprise customers, and compete wiht Amazon Web Services. Having the data centers is a start, but the interconnection services is another vital piece of the puzzle.

To start with, the deal will allow access to Aliyun’s cloud services in Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers in Hong Kong and Silicon Valley, but the pair plan to extend this to other Equinix data centers across North America and Asia.

The deal also covers other cloud-baed Aliyun services including software as a service (SaaS) applications. 

The Asian cloud market is growing, with Cisco putting its expansion at 38 percent per year, and predicting the region will be the busiest in the world, with 2.3 zettabytes annual traffic by 2018. 

Aliyun is the largest public cloud provider in China with 23 percent of the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) market, according to IDC, but has yet to compete effectively against Amazon, which leads globally.

The deal helps both firms, of course: “Our multi-national enterprise customers are increasingly asking for access to the Aliyun cloud platform, as they deploy cloud-based applications across Asia,” said Chris Sharp, vice president, cloud innovation, Equinix.

By providing this access in two strategic markets, we’re empowering businesses to build secure, private clouds, without compromising network and application performance.”