The vendors are teaming up with Chinese companies or government agencies to create joint ventures that will operate in the country. Dell, Qualcomm and Brocade are all using partnerships with Chinese entities to expand their presence in the country's massive market.Officials with all three U.S. tech vendors this past week said they are either creating joint ventures with Chinese companies or the government or investing in a Chinese-owned startup to gain more traction in a country that offers one of the fastest-growing tech markets in the world however, that also has made it increasingly challenging over the past several years for foreign technology companies to do business there.According to the China Daily newspaper, Dell CEO Michael Dell this past week said his company is investing in a cloud startup in China that is owned by Guizhou Wing Cloud High Technology, which has been partnering with Dell in the Chinese cloud market since the previous year. Michael Dell made the announcement during the China Big Data Industry Summit in Guiyang, capital of the Guizhou province.Dell will offer technology support to the startup, called Guizhou YottaCloud Technologies Co. Ltd. The company also will be a way for Dell to sell cloud services to small and midsize businesses in China, which is Dell's second-largest market in the world, behind the United States. For its partner, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Derek Aberle, president of chip maker Qualcomm, talked about his company's work with the Chinese government to create a joint venture that will enable Qualcomm to build and sell custom processors in the country. Qualcomm is the world's largest provider of systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) for smartphones, however, the chips developed via the joint venture will be for servers that will run in data centers, power Website and store data. Qualcomm officials first announced the partnership in January. Qualcomm will own 45 percent of the joint venture, with the other 55 percent being owned by the Guizhou government.It's a win for Qualcomm not only because it gives the company another foothold in China, however, it also furthers the company's ambitions to sell ARM-based server processors, which will be increasingly important to Qualcomm as the smartphone market continues to slow. Qualcomm is one of a number of chip makers—including Applied Micro, Cavium and Advanced Micro Devices—looking to bring ARM's low-power SoC designs into the data center in servers, networking systems and storage devices."This is really going to be the primary vehicle from which we build our data center business in China," Aberle told the Wall Street Journal. "We're actually trying to create the company that is going to be able to win the market here as opposed to just licensing old technology."Brocade officials May 27 announced a partnership with Guiyang High-Tech Industrial Investment Group to create a joint venture called Guizhou Huiling Technology Co. Ltd. that will combine Brocade's data center networking offerings with Guiyang's big data technologies.The new company will sell Brocade networking products and services, including switches, routers and storage networking infrastructure, to the local government in Guizhou as well as state-owned organizations, universities and enterprises. Guiyang will own 51 percent of the new company, and Brocade will own 49 percent.The agreements announced by Dell, Qualcomm and Brocade are the latest examples of U.S. companies hooking up with Chinese vendors or governments to gain entry into the market. Chinese legislators over the past several years, due to a desire to grow the country's own tech sector as well as ongoing suspicions of state-sponsored espionage between China and the United States, have put regulations in place that call for U.S. companies to partner with their counterparts in China.
- eWeek