Partnership involves SCAI, SITE and eWTP Arabia
Saudi Arabian comms operator stc has invested SR894 million ($238 million) to create a cloud service for the nation’s capital Riyadh. The online computing is to be created in a partnership with the Alibaba Group, eWTP Arabia for Technical Innovation, the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) and the Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE).
According to stc’s statement, its joint investment with Alibaba will provide cloud computing services to Riyadh. This reflects the company’s future vision and its ‘great role’ in pushing digital transformation efforts in Saudi Arabia. It wants to forge strong partnerships with the world’s top technology companies in line with the Kingdom’s 2030 vision.
Alibaba
Alibaba Cloud services include proprietary servers, chips, elastic computing, storage, network, security, database and big data. It uses these to compute various verticals with industry-specific problems, including financial services, telecoms, retail and industrial applications. As of March 31, 2022, Alibaba Cloud is selling computing services in 27 regions globally, adding new local Internet data centres in Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Germany in 2022.
Alibaba Cloud’s advantages are its proprietary technology for full-stack cloud infrastructure design, covering data centers, network technologies and proprietary hardware. In early 2022, it unveiled its proprietary server series Panjiu, which comprises a high-performance computing series, large-scale storage series and high-performance storage series.Â
According to the November 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for integrated infrastructure as a service and platform as a service (Iaas+PaaS), Alibaba Cloud was the third highest scored system among all the global vendors evaluated. In a Gartner report in April 2022, Alibaba Cloud was ranked the biggest IaaS player in Asia Pacific and the third largest globally as measured by revenue market share in 2021.Â