PRESS: Yandex enters cloud services market with own platform

MOSCOW, Sep 5 (PRIME) -- Internet company Yandex has launched its own cloud platform, Yandex.Cloud to compete on the Russian U.S. $400 million market with such foreign behemoths as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, business daily Kommersant reported on Wednesday.

Yandex.Cloud will allow companies from various industries to design and maintain web applications and services through Yandex’s infrastructure. It will offer the companies intending to improve effectiveness or expand business, but lacking resources, technological tools or competences, the platform’s creators told the daily.

“The Cloud will tackle these tasks fast and without large investment, the service could even become an alternative to firms’ own IT infrastructure,” they said.

The Internet company did not disclose the cost of the project, but said that the main investments were made in the team.

Yandex sees the country’s cloud services market at $400 million with an annual growth of 10–20%. The segments IaaS/PaaS, where Yandex.Cloud will work, accounts for slightly less than a half of this amount, or about $200 million.

Yandex wants to offer lower tariffs for its services than those of its rivals. A virtual machine with a dual core processor and random access memory of 8 GB will cost a client 1,800 rubles per month, while Amazon charges 4,700 rubles, Google 4,400 rubles, and Microsoft 5,700 rubles.

Experts told the daily that Yandex.Cloud has chances to get a significant share of the market because cloud services will develop rapidly in the country during at least several coming years.

According to Gartner, the world’s cloud services market will grow 21.4% in 2018 to $186.4 billion and could exceed $300 billion in 2021.

(68.2737 rubles – U.S. $1)

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