Microsoft is taking its Cloud OS show on the road to China, announcing a licensing pact with 21Vianet which will offer Windows Azure services from its local data centers. 21Vianet bills itself as the largest carrier-neutral Internet data center services provider in China.
This could be a huge deal: Most researchers see China as a huge potential market for cloud services. As Doug Hauger, GM of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business, pointed out in his blog post announcing the deal, Forrester Research estimates that the public cloud market in China will soar to $ 3.8 billion in 2020 from $ 297 million last year. But China could also be highly problematic, given the issues Google and other U.S. tech companies have had there.
Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest public cloud purveyor, has EC2 Asia Pacific coverage in Tokyo and Singapore and edge locations in Osaka, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.
Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user brandnliu
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