This represents the first major business cooperation with strategic investors after China Unicom’s mixed-ownership reform plan was approved. It also marks the first step of the in-depth strategic cooperation and building a power alliance with Alibaba.
China Unicom and Alibaba Cloud will deepen cooperation in three areas including public cloud, dedicated cloud and hybrid cloud. For public cloud, Alibaba Cloud will open public cloud services capabilities to China Unicom, including computing, storage, security, big data and artificial intelligence. Together with China Unicom’s expertise in customer services and network operation, both companies plan to leverage the branding of WO Cloud computing to provide customers with general and inclusive public cloud computing services. Meanwhile, both companies will continue to develop synergy between cloud and network, and deepen their collaboration in cloud computing service enhancement and talent development.
For dedicated cloud, both companies intend to combine their cloud computing and big data platform capabilities to support product innovation and business growth acceleration to enterprise customers. China Unicom and Alibaba Cloud will build a joint development team and support system targeting the e-government cloud, vertical markets, accelerating digital transformation and promoting IT capability enhancement for enterprise customers.
For hybrid cloud, China Unicom will open up key data centers nationwide and forms hybrid cloud computing one-stop service, combined with current Alibaba Cloud’s public cloud sites. This is designed to meet users’ on and off cloud connectivity demand. On the basis of interconnection at the data center, both companies jointly collaborate in research and development on the cloud computing-based SDN network structure, enhancing China Unicom’s network utilization efficiency, which allows users to open up nationwide interoperable hybrid cloud in real-time.
China Unicom and Alibaba plan to expand their cooperation in network security operation and capability enhancement. The two partners will jointly build a network security platform to support the internet ecosystem.
