IBM and Wanda form China cloud computing partnership

Reuters

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - IBM and a unit of China's Dalian Wanda Group, a property and entertainment conglomerate, agreed on Sunday to team up to provide cloud services to Chinese companies, the U.S. technology provider said. Through a newly formed venture, Wanda Cloud Company, they will offer select IBM cloud infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS and PaaS) technologies in China, IBM said. The venture between IBM and Wanda Internet Technology Group will be "responsible for distributing, building and operating the IBM cloud platform in China", an IBM spokeswoman said. In November, Alibaba Holdings Ltd's cloud unit announced plans to open four new data facilities outside China in a bid to grab market share from leading players Amazon.com and Microsoft. Research firm Canalys expects the global market for cloud computing, defined as the storage of data on remote networks rather than local servers, to reach $135 billion by 2020. (Reporting by Alexandra Harney; editing by Jason Neely)