E-commerce titan Alibaba has fully purchased Kanbox, which is a leading cloud storage provider in China, for an undisclosed sum.
Reports reveal that Alibaba stated that Kanbox users are now able to integrate their accounts on Alibaba related services.
Kanbox has been having a healthy growth since it was launched in 2010. It has accumulated over 15 million users, with 3 million of those accessing it from mobile. The company is also offering special accounts for Taobao sellers.
The acquisition comes at a time when Alibaba is continuing to cement its position in both mobile and cloud storage services and also venturing into web services that are consumer oriented, especially smartphones.
Alibaba released Aliyun OS that was developed using JavaScript and HTML5 in 2011. This project was not successful after Alibaba got a run in with Google after reports that it has developed an OS that is incompatible with android. This halted the upcoming launch of Acer device and the Aliyun OS did not get a large phone maker partnership. The stand alone Aliyun cloud storage is now used by businesses as opposed to average consumers.
After the acquisition, Alibaba and Kanbox are offering 10TB of free storage. The impact of Kanbox’s acquisition on Alibaba’s Aliyun project is not yet clear. However, the purchase confirms Alibaba’s push to integrate cloud storage infrastructure into its services.
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