Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 sees Alibaba add 8 products to its European cloud offering, all falling in inter-related categories such as big data, AI, infrastructure, security and private cloud.

“Alibaba Cloud wants to be an enabler for technology innovation in Europe helping enterprises do business,” the Chinese company says. “These advanced solutions will enable organisations in a wide range of sectors and will bring them true connectivity, both locally and globally.”

When it comes to data technology and AI, Alibaba offers 3 products-- Image Search solutions (allows users to search for information online and offline using images), Intelligent Services Robot (an enterprise chatbot) and Dataphin (a data engine designed to cope with cross-industry big data development, management and application needs).

Cisco announces an own take on containers-- the Cisco Container Platform, a "turnkey, open and production-grade" container platform allowing customers to run applications the same way on premises and in public clouds.

Based on the open-source upstream Kubernetes container orchestration platform, Cisco Container Platform promises to address the end-to-end management of container clusers, including setup, orchestration, authentication, monitoring, networking, load balancing and optimisation. It is also extensible to other deployment environments and to networking, security, analytics and management tools.

The latest version of Cisco HyperFlex is all about multiple clouds-- as the company describes it, HyperFlex 3.0 is a "platform for the multicloud era" complete with Microsoft Hyper-V support.

As Cisco puts it, "our aim is nothing less than to help our customers power any app, on any cloud, at any scale." As such, the company uses an end-to-end approach, engineering high performance server and networking through a purpose-built file system. The result is datacentre performance allowing users to support a broader range of applications, including databases and mission critical ERP workloads.

According to IDC global spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will reach $160 billion in 2018-- a 23.2% increase over 2017. The analyst adds spending over the 2016-2021 period will reach a CAGR of 21.9%, with public cloud spending totaling $277bn in 2021.

The industries spending most on public cloud services in 2018 are discrete manufacturing ($19.7bn), professional services ($18.1bn) and banking ($16.7bn). The process manufacturing and retail industries are expected to spend over $10bn each on public cloud service in 2018. These 5 industries remain at the top in 2021 due to continued investment in public cloud solutions. The industries with the fastest spending growth over the 2016-2021 period are professional services (24.4% CAGR), telecommunications (23.3% CAGR), and banking (23.0% CAGR).