• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 4, 2015

Alibaba announced Wednesday that Aliyun, its cloud-computing subsidiary, will plant stakes in Silicon Valley to gain entrance into the U.S. market, according to a company blog post. The U.S. data center will complement those in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, while trying to compete with a flooded U.S. market.

Adobe, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, Rackspace, and SAP are among many others that offer similar cloud services. Cloud computing has become the backbone of businesses. Data centers not only support search engines and social sites that allow users to upload and save still images and videos, but advertising agencies use cloud computing to store and share campaign data and images.

In fact, cloud computing will become the underpinning for many advertising agency and media services this year. The convergence of cloud and mobile computing will contribute to the growth of centrally coordinated applications delivered to any device. It will become the basis for self-service computing, wearable computers, and enterprise applications, per Gartner. 

Market research firm IDC predicts the cloud market, worldwide, which encompasses private, public and hybrid clouds, will reach $118 billion this year, up from $95.8 billion in 2014. IDC expects that by 2018, the market will reach $200 billion.

The Aliyun data center will offer several services, including one that allows businesses to rent server capacity on an as-needed basis. It also will offer a load-balancing service used by Web site operators to manage their traffic-carrying capacity, and a cloud-based relational database service providing data processing and storage in the cloud.