Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group’s digital technology and intelligence backbone unveiled its latest international strategic roadmap at the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit.
During the three-day summit, the trusted cloud provider announced new products to support enterprise technology innovation, a USD1 billion investment to upgrade the global partner ecosystem, and enhanced customer services to provide comprehensive support throughout a customer’s digitalization journey.
Technology innovation to power rapidly increasing cloud consumption
With more organizations migrating to the cloud and increased demand for cloud services in a hybrid environment, Alibaba Cloud has made a number of its established infrastructure products, including a multi-model cloud-native database and distributed cloud services, available globally. This new product line seeks to offer enterprise customers with a broader choice of cloud services, including network, storage, and computing.
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0, the newly available network services, provides global intelligent networking to support enterprises’ global expansion. CEN 2.0 supports ultra-large-scale networking capabilities with higher availability, lower latency, enhanced security capability and greater flexibility in pricing options for enterprises, compared to the previous version.
Alibaba Cloud has also announced ESSD Auto PL, a storage product that delivers block storage services and allows automatic scaling in seconds, allowing organizations to withstand unanticipated traffic surges. It delivers up to one million IOPS (input/output operations per second), which is much more than the industry norm, as the world’s leading elastic block storage system with auto-scaling function.
Last year, Lindorm, Alibaba Cloud’s cloud-native multi-model database, successfully enabled Alibaba Group’s 11.11, the world’s largest shopping festival. Lindorm has been helping customers in many industries in China, including automotive, finance, and manufacturing, thanks to its high availability and low storage cost. It was designed for fusion-processing requirements for wide tables, time series, space-time, and diverse unstructured data.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced ACK One (Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform), a multi-region and multi-cluster container management platform to provide a consistent management, delivery and operation experience for enterprises. It allows users to implement container cluster management, resource scheduling, data disaster recovery and application delivery through a unified platform, whether in a public cloud, private cloud or on-premise environment. ACK One is the latest addition to ACK Anywhere, Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes. Earlier this year, among the eight significant industry players evaluated, Alibaba Cloud was named a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester Wave Public Cloud Container Platforms Q1 2022 for the first time.
Finally, CloudBox integrates Alibaba Cloud’s public cloud infrastructure technologies such as compute, storage, and network to provide organizations with fully managed cloud services for deployment close to clients’ business premises. CloudBox provides a consistent experience as Alibaba Cloud’s public cloud while satisfying organizations’ demand for on-premise data processing and low latency computation. CloudBox is intended for multinational corporations with Chinese operations.
Alibaba Cloud has been expanding its capabilities in computing, storage, networking, and security. For example, its recently introduced Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU), a dedicated processing unit designed for its Apsara Cloud operating system, can reduce network latency to as low as five microseconds and improve computing power performance in data-intensive AI and data analytics scenarios by up to 30 percent.
Prioritizing partner benefits to build inclusive technology ecosystem
With its revamped ecosystem strategy, Alibaba Cloud has announced that it is committed to investing USD1 billion to support partners’ technology innovation and their market expansion with Alibaba Cloud in the coming three fiscal years. This investment consists of both financial and non-financial incentives, such as funding, rebates and go-to-market initiatives.
To accelerate partners’ growth, Alibaba Cloud also launched a ‘Regional Accelerator’ program to provide partners operating in different markets with a localized business collaboration model. The model is designed around factors such as a market’s level of technical maturity, vertical focus, digitalization needs and business demands, with an aim to boost partners’ income and strengthen their technical expertise. Alibaba Cloud ecosystem partners including resellers, technology partners (ISV, SaaS and SI), service and consulting partners can benefit from the program.
Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President, said, “Partners have always been a key focus for Alibaba Cloud, and we are committed to providing them with strong support for our ongoing co-creation and value-add – both technologically and commercially – to further empower our joined customers. Our revamped partner strategy prioritizes our partners’ growth. By continuing to support our partners’ business expansion, we can build an inclusive ecosystem benefiting partners and customers.”
To address complications with partners’ international business operations, Alibaba Cloud has also upgraded its collaboration model with its ISV partners, with a focus on enhancing industry collaboration, standardizing go-to-market process, and accelerating technical solution integration to increase efficiency. Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud hopes to recruit more financial services, retail, internet and manufacturing ISVs to co-develop products and support customer innovation.
Alibaba Cloud currently works with about 11,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM and Neo4j.
Empowering customers with comprehensive support
Alibaba Cloud also established a ‘Global Delivery and Service Program’ to improve client cloud adoption. It has opened three Customer Service Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Porto (Portugal), and Mexico City (Mexico) as part of the program to assist customers in their cloud adoption journeys by offering timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services.
In addition to the Customer Service Centers, Alibaba Cloud has established three Service Delivery Centers in Malaysia, Dubai (United Arab Emirates), and Hong Kong (Greater China) to provide additional technology support to its regional offices and customer project delivery in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.
Fueling new innovations with reliable infrastructure
During the summit, Alibaba Cloud has inked nearly 30 agreements to help customers and partners accelerate their digital innovation capabilities with leading cloud computing technologies.
Alibaba Cloud has announced a new set of services to create virtual spaces and lifelike avatars for worldwide customers stepping into the metaverse in collaboration with JP Games, one of Japan’s largest game development studios.
Alibaba Cloud, in collaboration with MetaverseXR, Thailand’s top metaverse firm, launched a comprehensive suite of metaverse solutions for the Thai market in order to meet the rising local demand for Web 3.0 adoption.
In Myanmar, Alibaba Cloud partnered with UMG Group to power the country’s digital transformation, particularly in traditional industries.
With BeLive and VisionTech from Singapore, Alibaba Cloud is increasing its regional presence in the media and Fintech verticals.
Alibaba Cloud is cooperating with OnFinality, a renowned New Zealand-based blockchain infrastructure provider, to deliver powerful cloud computing capability and a strong global network for Web 3.0 developers seeking to scale globally.
More than 300 Alibaba Cloud clients and partners from around the world are attending the summit, including Accenture, Tiger Brokers, DANA, Thai Data, and Lala Station.
