Salesforce, Alibaba team up to bring business cloud solutions to Greater China

Salesforce, a leading cloud business solutions company in the US, has partnered with Alibaba to bring its services to the Greater China region amid an increase in demand for cloud solutions as companies move towards digitizing their operations.

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Salesforce said on Wednesday in a blog post that it would be working with Alibaba Cloud to bring its customer relationship management solutions, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Salesforce Platform, to customers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

These cloud solutions help merchants and salespeople centralize and analyze data, keep track of interactions with clients, and identify new sales leads.

“At Salesforce, customer success is at the center of everything we do. And more and more of our multinational customers are asking us to support them wherever they do business around the world,” said Ryan Aytay, Salesforce’s executive vice president of strategic partnerships in a statement.

“With Alibaba’s strong, advanced, and secure cloud infrastructure network and insight into the Chinese market, both parties will provide the best-localized solutions for our global customers,” he added.

The partnership comes as competition heats up in the region for cloud computing and cloud-based business solutions, where data and data-processing services can be accessed from the cloud instead of using physical servers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm and the world’s largest cloud services provider, in April launched data centers and cloud infrastructure in the city as it seeks to ramp up services provided to users in Asia Pacific.

According to a Gartner report released in April, Alibaba Cloud is currently the market leader in Asia Pacific for services such as infrastructure-as-a-service and infrastructure utility services in 2018.

Globally, Alibaba Cloud is the third-largest cloud services provider, with a 4.9% market share, lagging behind leaders AWS and Microsoft, according to Gartner.

New York-listed Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

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