Zhang Lijun, chief enterprise technologist of Dell's division in the Asia-Pacific region, works six months out of the year in Shanghai and the rest of the year in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, promoting a new cloud computing project by the company.

Since July 2015, Dell and Guizhou Wing Cloud High Technology have been working to construct a cloud service platform designed for China's small and medium-sized companies and local governments, the first of its kind in the country.

The "Dell-Wing Cloud Hybrid Cloud Platform" will provide cloud computing resources and support to the development of the province's big data and cloud computing industries, Zhang said.

The joint cloud platform went online in February for public testing, and more details will be released by Wing Cloud during this year's Big Data Expo held in Guiyang late this May.

Guizhou has carried out a number of measures to deploy a strategy to develop the big data industry since 2014, such as the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Dell in January last year.

Wing Cloud has invested 300 million yuan ($46 million) to set up a 8,800-square-meter cloud computing data center called "Guiyang No 1".

The company finished construction of the first phase of the center, which not only supports the running of e-government affairs and the provincial capital's educational and traffic control systems, but also answers demand for IT services from about 100,000 SMEs.

"We have now 3,000 servers in operation and the number will rise to 12,000 when we finish the second phase," said Ouyang Chuan, marketing director of Wing Cloud.

With advanced technologies, the center promises in its service-level agreement that any downtime of its servers will last at most four hours within a year.

Wing Cloud will also establish a cloud computing incubator for innovation startups, which will get resources from Microsoft, Intel and Dell. Companies in the incubator can enjoy several preferential policies provided by both the province and its capital.

Contact the writers through zengjun@chinadaily.com.cn