Brief: The Chinese Cloud Market Is Entering A New Era

The Chinese cloud market has grown quickly over the past three years. However, cloud providers have focused primarily on the basic features of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings and have not paid enough attention to hybrid public/private architecture support, service quality, and the partner ecosystem — three dimensions that are critical to companies doing business in China. With its recent commercial launch of Windows Azure, Microsoft aims to change the game and transform the Chinese cloud market. This report analyzes the dynamics of the Chinese cloud market affected by this launch. Enterprise architecture professionals in multinational corporations and local companies alike should be aware of these dynamics and devise a strategy to take advantage of them.