Alibaba is often likened to Amazon as it dominates online retail and cloud services in China, with the prospect of more direct competition as it expands into other geographical areas. They are also both targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), where again Alibaba is confining its ambitions to China for now. To this end, it has teamed up with Siemens to realize this ambition – highlighting the growing extent of collaboration between the major Chinese technology players and large partners in North America and China. In some cases, partners are attracted by the prospect of access to Chinese data for improving their machine learning or AI models but here the main motivation is access to a huge IIoT market,…