More and more companies are trying to get a foothold in China as part of their international expansion – and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) is one, having worked with managed cloud services provider Datapipe to enter the Chinese market using Alibaba Cloud.

Datapipe has been working with Alibaba as a global managed service provider of its cloud arm since 2016, and was also named the leading Asia Pacific managed cloud company by Frost & Sullivan. For BMJ, the concept was straightforward, needing a partner on the ground in China with knowledge of the market to take advantage of Alibaba’s local public cloud infrastructure.

“We have now fully realised the strategy that we first mapped out two years ago, when we started our cloud journey,” said Alex Hooper, BMJ head of operations. “In the first year, we were able to fully virtualise our infrastructure using Datapipe’s private cloud, and in the process, move to a new, agile way of working. In this second year, we have embraced public cloud and taken our services over to China.”

This is not the BMJ’s first dalliance with Datapipe; the company had previously used the managed service provider to help refresh its legacy technology stack, moving from one release a month on average to up to four times a day, with Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer, describing the working relationships between dev, ops, test and business needs as ‘unrecognisable’ from before.

As regular readers of this publication will be aware, Alibaba is making concerted cloud strides. Last month, with the publication of its financial results, CEO Daniel Zhang said its cloud business “continues to enjoy high growth at scale” and the recent passing of the one million customer mark is “merely a starting point.”

Writing for this publication last month, Alibaba Cloud noted the importance of not falling into various traps when moving into the Chinese market. “China is a highly competitive market, and consumers expect a smooth and secure online experience,” the company wrote. “The flexibility, scalability and security offered by the cloud provides an optimal solution to boost your website in China’s competitive online space.”

You can find out more about Datapipe’s integration with Alibaba Cloud here.

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