Since its huge US IPO, Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has been building up its armory to take on its western counterpart, Amazon, in cloud and mobile services. Its latest move is reported to be a plan to acquire ZTE’s software division, ZTEsoft, for about $440m. Bloomberg sources claim that negotiations have been going on for months and are close to fruition. The deal would help Alibaba extend its cloud activities outside China to step up the challenge to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, taking advantage of ZTE’s established relationships with European and African telcos. That could accelerate Alibaba Cloud’s moves to add further operators to its roster, having already signed up Vodafone as a customer. ZTEsoft was spun off…