Exclusive: Alibaba to appoint pan-European distributor in channel push

Chinese vendor looks to bolster VAR ranks as European expansion continues

Public cloud giant Alibaba is set to continue its expansion in Europe with the announcement of a pan-European distribution partnership.

Yeming Wang, Alibaba's EMEA general manager, said that a contract with the distributor has been signed, but could not yet reveal the chosen firm.

The agreement marks the next phase in Alibaba's move into Europe, which last month saw it launch its two London datacentres.

The vendor had already set up in Germany.

Alibaba has relationships with a number of systems integrators, but Wang said the distribution partnership will allow it to on-board smaller partners, namely VARs, managed service providers and ISVs, more quickly.

"We have a pan-European distributor; the contract is signed but it is too early to say [who it is]," he said.

"It will create general coverage to provide services, and they will deal with resellers and VARs.

"This is their purpose and they very much believe that hardware will go to the cloud, so this is the right thing to do."

Wang said that while smaller partners cannot match the reach of the SIs that Alibaba already works with, they are showing their worth - particularly in the DevOps space.

On launching in the UK, Alibaba said it is placing a great deal of emphasis on targeting vertical markets - particularly in the finance, retail, media and logistics industries.

While Alibaba provides the infrastructure and much of the services, Wang said, these smaller partners are key to tailoring products more precisely to customers, by building their own solutions on top of the Chinese vendor's architecture.

Stay tuned to ChannelWeb for a full write-up of our interview with Wang.