Alibaba in talks with BT Group over possible cloud partnership

BT Group is in talks with Alibaba over a cloud services partnership that would help the Chinese digital giant enter into European markets with a challenge to part of Amazon's business.

BT is in talks with Alibaba, a spokeswoman told Bloomberg, but gave no further details. Alibaba has a partnership with Vodafone Group in Germany, which might be expected to provide a blueprint to a UK deal.

Alibaba has set out plan to expand beyond China and challenge Amazon as it is now the fourth-biggest global provider of cloud infrastructure and related services behind Amazon, Microsoft Corp and Google.

Yeming Wang, GM for Alibaba Cloud EMEA, recently told Data Economy Magazine of the group's plans to expand across the region: “It is too early to say we want to compete outside of China with AWS or anybody else, because we have three years [of being active in the market], others have maybe more than ten years. But we want to get excellence in some of the verticals.

“Especially those verticals where the Alibaba Group is very specialised in, such as retail, fintech or media.”

BT Global Services has already struck up partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft and Cisco Systems Inc. A deal with Alibaba could bolster BT’s cloud computing and big data skills as clients shift more of their IT capacity offsite to reduce costs.