Chinese Cloud Giant Tencent Seeks Partners

Chinese internet giant Tencent is looking to eschew international borders and bring forth new cloud options that could eventually make the company a rival to the likes of Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS.

Tencent has long been a leader in its native China, where it’s known as one of the largest internet technology companies, with a reported market value of $580 billion.

The company’s cloud services division, Tencent Cloud, has made significant inroads into the international market by launching cloud data centers across the globe, including the U.S. (Silicon Valley), Hong Kong, Mumbai, Frankfurt, Seoul and Moscow, making it a viable international player that can compete beyond its native China borders — a fact that should garner interest among MSPs seeking to expand their offerings and reach.

The company’s strategy is heavily dependent upon one of its latest offerings, called TStack, an OpenStack–based computing platform designed for building cloud services, with IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS pre-integrated. For MSPs, Tencent’s combination of a global cloud presence and the TStack platform brings forth opportunities to create new, competitive services that can reach across the great firewall of China, yet still service clients worldwide.

“TStack will bring forth new opportunities to prospective partners who are looking to globalize web services and also work with China’s leading provider of internet value-added services in China,” Brett Roberts, account director at Tencent Cloud, told Channel Futures at last week’s Vancouver-based OpenStack Summit.

Some businesses already are starting to take notice, and partnerships are growing. For example, Zenlayer, a global software-defined networking and services provider, announced in May that Zenlink, its SD-WAN Cloud Connect platform, now supports direct connections to Tencent Cloud.

Using Zenlink, enterprises can instantly provision high-speed, dedicated network connections to Tencent Cloud to accelerate mission-critical data transmission and pursue hybrid and multicloud strategies, while also enabling private connections between clouds and data centers. Connections to other cloud providers such as AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and SAP Cloud are also available through Zenlink.

“The demand for direct access to major cloud service providers like Tencent Cloud is growing, and we are pleased to offer dedicated connections from our data centers,” said Joe Zhu, CEO and founder of Zenlayer. “Today, many of our customers use Zenlink to build hybrid and multicloud architectures to leverage different cloud providers’ strengths and minimize vendor lock-in, creating the best cloud solution tailored to their unique business requirements.”

For MSPs, some questions remain, yet the overall indication is that more avenues to build services are always welcome.

“As far as cloud services are concerned, having more options and more competitors offering those options can only bring forth better solutions, paired with lower prices,” said Raj Mehta, CEO of Infosys International. “Two elements that are becoming more critical to be successful as an MSP today.”

Time will only tell if Tencent Cloud’s move beyond Asia will offer lasting success; however, the company seems to be making the correct steps in the right direction to become a player in web services.