(Yicai Global) Sept. 12 -- Samuel Shen, former chairman at Microsoft Asia-Pacific Technology Co. has formally joined JD.Com, Inc. [NASDAQ:JD] to serve as JD's cloud division president fully responsible for JD's cloud computing and related businesses, JD.Com said in a statement today.

Shen joined Microsoft in 1993 and served as chairman at Microsoft Asia-Pacific Technology Co. and general manager of cloud and enterprise division of Microsoft China, having been responsible for Microsoft Azure cloud services end to end chain management including strategy, engineering, operations, maintenance and customer service in Greater China region, 36kr.com reported.

According to Deutsche Bank GA [FRA:DBK;NYSE:DB] and Canalys, in the first quarter of this year, the top firms in the global public cloud market rankings were Amazon AWS, Microsoft Corporation [NASDAQ:MSFT], Alphabet Inc (Google) [NASDAQ:GOOGL] and IBM [NYSE:IBM], all from the US. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s [NYSE:BABA] cloud service provider Alibaba Cloud, which occupies more than 50 percent of the market share in China, ranked seventh in the global public cloud ranking, with a global market share of only 2.6 percent. The data shows that the development of China's cloud service is still lagging behind the United States.

However, Deutsche Bank's report predicts that the market size of China's public cloud including IaaS and PaaS will grow from USD1.5 billion in 2016 to USD15.4 billion in 2020, with annual compound growth of 79.1 percent. 

Shen's joining the company will help JD.Com speed up its efforts in cloud computing and other services to take up a larger share of China's cloud services market, said Liu Qiangdong, chairman and chief executive officer of JD.Com.