Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intellectual backbone of Alibaba Group has announced its latest international strategic roadmap at the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit. During the three-day summit, the trusted cloud provider revealed new products to support technology innovation among enterprises, an investment of USD1 billion for a global partner ecosystem upgrade, and enhanced customer services to provide comprehensive support throughout a customer’s digitalization journey.
Technology innovation to power rapidly increasing cloud consumption
With more enterprises moving to the cloud and an increase in demand for cloud services in a hybrid environment, Alibaba Cloud has made available globally a series of its proven infrastructure products, a multi-model cloud-native database, and distributed cloud services. This range of new products aims to provide enterprise customers with a wider scope of cloud services covering network, storage, and computing.
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0, the newly available network service, 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 unveiled a storage product called ESSD Auto PL, which provides block storage services and supports automatic scaling within seconds to allow businesses to handle sudden traffic surges. As the world’s leading elastic block storage product with an auto-scaling function, it offers up to one million IOPS (input/output operations per second), significantly higher than the industry average.
Lindorm, the cloud-native multi-model database developed by Alibaba Cloud, successfully supported Alibaba Group’s 11.11, the world’s largest shopping festival, last year. Designed for fusion-processing requirements for wide tables, time series, space-time, and various unstructured data, Lindorm has also been supporting customers in various industries in China – including automotive, finance, and manufacturing – thanks to its high availability and low storage cost.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced ACK One (Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform), a multi-region and multi-cluster container management platform to provide 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.
Lastly, to support enterprises’ need for a hybrid cloud, CloudBox integrates Alibaba Cloud’s public cloud infrastructure technologies such as computing, storage, and network to provide enterprises with fully managed cloud services for deployment close to customers’ business premises. CloudBox delivers a consistent experience as Alibaba Cloud’s public cloud while meeting enterprises’ demand for on-premise data processing and low latency computing. CloudBox is designed for multinational companies with business operations in China.
Alibaba Cloud has been strengthening its capabilities in computing, storage, network, and security. For example, its recently unveiled 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 as much as 30%.
Prioritizing partner benefits to build an 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, to boost partners’ income and strengthen their technical expertise. Alibaba Cloud ecosystem partners including resellers, technology partners (ISV, SaaS, and SI), and service and consulting partners can benefit from the program.
“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,” said Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President. “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 the 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
To provide all-round cloud-based solutions and services to all customers, Alibaba Cloud also launched a “Global Delivery and Service Program” to enhance the cloud adoption process for customers. Under the program, it has unveiled three Customer Service Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Porto (Portugal), and Mexico City (Mexico), to support customers in their cloud adoption journey, providing timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services.
In addition to the Customer Service Centers, Alibaba Cloud has set up three Service Delivery Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), and Hong Kong (Greater China), to provide extra technology support to its regional offices and customer project delivery in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Fueling 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.
In collaboration with JP Games, Japan’s leading game development studio, Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a set of new services to create virtual spaces and realistic avatars for global customers venturing into the metaverse.
Together with MetaverseXR, Thailand’s leading metaverse company, Alibaba Cloud rolled out a comprehensive suite of metaverse solutions for the Thai market to fulfill the growing local demand for embarking on a Web 3.0 journey.
Alibaba Cloud also teamed up with UMG Group in Myanmar, to power the country’s digital transformation – especially in traditional industries.
With BeLive and VisionTech from Singapore, Alibaba Cloud is expanding its regional outreach in the media and Fintech verticals.
Alibaba Cloud is collaborating with OnFinality, a leading New Zealand-based blockchain infrastructure provider, to offer a robust cloud-computing capability and a strong global network for Web 3.0 developers looking to scale globally.
More than 300 Alibaba Cloud customers and partners around the globe are attending the summit, including Accenture, Tiger Brokers, DANA, Thai Data, and Lala station.