IBM teams up with Tencent to penetrate Chinese cloud market

IBM rackserver
Tencent Cloud is likely to be entirely powered by IBM.

IBM and Tencent have today announced that they plan to work closely together to extend the latter's public cloud to the enterprise (presumably the bulging Chinese market).

Tencent is one of China's largest service providers with nearly one billion Chinese users; its online portfolio is primarily a consumer one and includes QQ, a popular instant messaging service, Weibo, a rival to Twitter, TenPay, which competes with PayPal, Qzone, a Facebook competitor.

IBM gains access to one of the world's largest markets while Tencent gets to tap into IBM's extensive technology portfolio. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) mentions the common will to "build and market" a new "class of public cloud" that will target verticals.

The core components of that offering will include cloud migration and integration services as well as a range of tailored SaaS (software-as-a-service) packages ranging from customer care to digital marketing and even enterprise asset management.

Both companies will jointly "promote industry innovation" and will pool resources and global capacity where necessary to "benefit enterprise customers".

The two will initially focus their efort on fast growing small and growing enterprises in the smarter care and smarter cities markets.

Big Blue has been on a roll lately with important partnerships being signed with SAP, Apple, Twitter and Microsoft to give it more leverage in the enterprise market.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.