China Unicom has announced its first collaborations with its new minority shareholders as part of its mixed ownership reform pilot program.
The operator has entered an agreement with Alibaba Group to strengthen their co-operation in the cloud business.
Under the agreement, Alibaba will open its Alibaba Cloud public cloud capability to Unicom, including computing, storage, security, big data and artificial intelligence.
The collaboration also covers private and hybrid cloud, with Unicom agreeing to open up key data centers nationwide and developing a on-stop hybrid cloud solution with services from both companies.
The partners will also jointly target e-government cloud and other vertical markets with private cloud services.
Separately, Unicom has agreed to work with Tencent to jointly build cloud data centers that will offer value-chain-wide cloud computing-based products, services and solutions to the market.
This agreement too covers private and hybrid cloud services, with the companies aiming to form an open, worldwide cloud computing industry ecosystem.
Both Unicom's agreements with Alibaba and Tencent also cover collaboration on network security services.
Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu all led a 78 billion yuan ($11.75 billion) investment in China Unicom as part of the government's mixed ownership reform pilot program. If the pilot is successful, the model will be extended to fellow state-owned operators China Telecom and China Mobile.