RIYADH — The Saudi Cloud Computing Company (SCCC) has announced the launch of its services in Saudi Arabia in the culmination of choosing Riyadh as a regional hub for Alibaba Cloud operations. The announcement was made at a ceremony held in Riyadh on Sunday in the presence of a number of officials of the government and private sectors.

The SCCC is a new joint venture formed by Alibaba Cloud, Saudi Telecom Company (stc) Group, eWTP Arabia Capital, the Saudi Company for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) and the Saudi Information Technology Company (SITE) to keep pace with the growing demand for cloud services in the Kingdom.

During the launch, which took place in the presence of a joint management team from stc Group, eWTP Arabia Capital and Alibaba Cloud, the company unveiled the opening of two data centers in Riyadh, the first among 16 centers to be opened across the administrative regions of Saudi Arabia.

With data stored within Saudi Arabia, the two data centers will offer customers in the Kingdom a local option to utilize cloud capabilities with high availability, elasticity, security and sustainability.

The new data centers provide a wide range of proven and secure public cloud computing solutions ranging from elastic compute, storage, network to databases to cater for the surging business demand from industries such as retail, fintech, internet and so on along the path of their digitalization journey in the region.

Previously, Alibaba Cloud company has announced that it has allocated up to $500 million for its investments in Saudi Arabia over the next five years, citing that the investments will include the provision of high-level inclusive resources to help build sustainability and ensure localization. Its Riyadh center was opened to provide better services for local and regional clients in Saudi Arabia, the Middle East and North Africa which will serve as a regional hub for management and training.

Faisal Al-Khamisi, Chairman of the Saudi Cloud Computing Company, has stressed that the launch of SCCC is a unique achievement and an important step in supporting the digital transformation process that the Kingdom is witnessing in line of its relentless and serious objective to become a data center that connects the continents of the world.

"Today, under the guidance and follow-up of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, leader of the Kingdom's Vision 2030, the launch of SCCC’s services, a few days after the company's establishment, has become clear evidence that we are working within the vision of a leader who works to facilitate all difficulties to ease legislation and laws in the Kingdom, support attracting investments, and enhance the Kingdom’s digital position in the world,” Al-Khamisi added.

He also mentioned that the partners in this project are working to increase the scope of services to include every public sector and private entity.

For her part, Selina Yuan, Alibaba Group VP & Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President said “Saudi Arabia is a very strategic and important market for Alibaba Cloud. This launch of the new joint venture is a significant milestone toward our commitment to forging collaborations with local partners to boost the digital transformation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. By collaborating closely with stc Group and other local partners, we are pleased and confident that Alibaba Cloud will support more local enterprises benefiting from the leading cloud computing technologies”. — SPA