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While Amazon, Google and Microsoft have been busy doing battle in the public cloud market, the rise of Chinese challenger Alibaba may have gone unnoticed by some enterprise IT buyers. According to market watcher Gartner, Alibaba is a third place provider within the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud services market for a second consecutive year. The company had a 7.7% market share, Gartner’s data shows, which is higher than Google’s 4%, but considerably lower than Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) 47.8% and Microsoft’s 15.5%. As the dominant IaaS provider in China and number one cloud service provider in the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud grew by a whopping 92.6% in 2018. What may have passed some people by is the effort the company has gone to in recent years to build out its footprint elsewhere in the world, as it prepares to go to war with the US cloud giants. As reported by Computer Weekly at the time, Alibaba opened datacentres in Frankfurt and Dubai in 2016 in response to customer demand in Europe and the Middle ...