Hewlett Packard Enterprise has joined forces with Alibaba Cloud to deliver on-premise hybrid cloud solutions with Apsara Stack on HPE platforms in Asia Pacific.
Terms of the alliance will the tech giants - alongside Intel - collaborate to “optimise and certify” Apsara Stack cloud services on HPE platforms, including HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers and HPE FlexFabric networking switches.
The move is designed to accelerate small to large scale hybrid cloud deployments ranging from 20 to 10,000 servers.
“Customers are increasingly looking to deploy and design the right mix of cloud environments to take on different workloads of data while maintaining control of on- and off-premises solutions,” said Scott Morris, vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific channels at HPE.
“In supporting Alibaba Cloud, we’re aiming to help customers leverage Apsara Stack powered by HPE technology and services to deploy a comprehensive suite of scalable cloud computing services that securely and cost-effectively manage their business needs.”
Operating as an extension of the Alibaba Cloud public cloud architecture, Apsara Stack provides a hyper-scale and built-in hybrid cloud services platform for enterprise organisations.
By certifying and optimising Apsara Stack on HPE’s hybrid IT product portfolio, Alibaba Cloud customers now have access to more than 60 available services, spanning artificial intelligence, elastic GPU computing and business intelligence.
“Our collaboration with HPE demonstrates how Alibaba Cloud’s partner network continues to be an important strategic asset to driving digital transformation for customers,” added Jin Ma, general manager of dedicated cloud and enterprise application at Alibaba Cloud.
“We aim to empower enterprises to build a powerful shared service platform in their on-premise data centre that complies with security, regulation and data sovereignty requirements.”
The HPE-based offering, using Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based platform, is targeted for availability end-2018 across Asia Pacific excluding China.
Furthermore, the alliance comes less than a week after Alibaba Cloud launched a dedicated partner program across ASEAN, designed to drive market growth through the channel.
Officially labelled ASEAN Partner Alliance Programme, the initiative aims to develop an ecosystem compromising of service providers, system integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs) and start-ups.
In addition to alliance vendors, the program aims to recruit 150 solution partners during the next 12 months, backed up by the training of 600 sales and technology personnel.
