WANdisco, the Live Data Company, announces it has entered into a non-exclusive OEM ('Original Equipment Manufacturer') sales agreement with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group.

Under the sales agreement, WANdisco Fusion, a solution that seamlessly replicates transactional data at petabyte scale without downtime or disruption, will be sold as a standard component on Alibaba Cloud, covering several key aspects including Live Data migration to Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud for disaster recovery and hybrid big data with Alibaba Cloud.  The partnership represents a substantial increase in WANdisco's addressable market and a significant extension of its channel strategy.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today announced the commencement of operations for its first data center in Indonesia. The data center is the first global public cloud platform in the country that will now provide a local choice for Indonesian businesses, particularly SMEs and startups, by offering a powerful, reliable and cost-effective cloud product and services. Alibaba Cloud's data center will also help Indonesian customers with low latency or data residency requirements to store and process data within the country.

The data center will offer a comprehensive suite of cloud products and services ranging from elastic computing, database service, networking, security and middleware to analytics and big data. This full range of Alibaba Cloud's solutions will satisfy the surging needs of local enterprises across a range of industries including e-commerce, media, Fintech, gaming, logistics, transportation and manufacturing. In particular, the big data service "MaxCompute", a big data platform that allows users to store and process massive amounts of structural data to levels as high as terabyte or even petabyte, will bring sophisticated data intelligence services such as data processing, analytics and machine learning to Indonesian businesses, empowering data-driven innovation and business transformation.

"As the only global cloud services provider originating from Asia, we are uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages to provide innovative data intelligence solutions and computing capabilities to customers across this region," said Alex Li, General Manager of Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud.

Grazed from Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today launched eight products ranging from big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to infrastructure, security and private cloud solutions at the Mobile World Congress that is taking place in Barcelona Spain. The array of products will meet the surging demand for powerful and reliable cloud computing services as well as advanced AI solutions among European enterprises to support them to capture opportunities in this digital transformation era. Bringing together these products with the expertise and real experience available from Alibaba Cloud, customers can put in place cutting edge solutions particularly in areas such as online and offline retail integration, smart manufacturing and smart city development.

The new products being launched for European enterprises fall into a number of inter-related categories. In relation to data technology and AI, Alibaba Cloud is launching three key products - Image Search solutions, which allow users to search for information online and offline using images; Intelligent Services Robot, a chatbot for business; and Dataphin, an intelligent data engine developed to cope with the cross-industry big data development, management and application needs.

Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the foundation and fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration. In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch ECS Baremetal Instance, a new high performance computing solution of ECS that combines the strengths of virtualized systems and bare metal servers. When connected as a supercomputer, ECS Baremetal Instances becomes a Super Computing Cluster that will reduce network latency to the level of micro-seconds while offering elasticity and supercomputing capabilities.

Express Logic, provider of the comprehensive X-Ware IoT Platform powered by the industry leading ThreadX RTOS, announced today turnkey support for all the leading cloud providers. Among this group are Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Baidu, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Tencent, and Xively. Designed from the ground up to be industrial grade, and developed entirely in-house by Express Logic engineers, the X-Ware IoT Platform leverages its size, performance, safety, security, ease of use, and other advanced features to provide best-of-class IoT connectivity for deeply embedded IoT sensors, devices, edge routers, and gateways.

Powered By ThreadX

Express Logic's high-performance ThreadX RTOS is at the heart of the X-Ware IoT Platform. With over 6.2 billion deployments, as certified by VDC Research, ThreadX is arguably the world's most widely deployed RTOS. ThreadX provides embedded developers with priority-based preemptive scheduling, preemption-threshold scheduling, optimized context switching, real-time event trace, downloadable memory-protected application modules, and full determinism, all accessed through a highly intuitive API. ThreadX is deployed in environments where small footprint, low overhead, high performance, solid reliability, and fast time-to-market are essential. ThreadX is ideally suited for cloud-infrastructure connectivity and related products from such sectors as consumer electronics, medical and scientific instrumentation, industrial control and automation, automotive, aerospace, and more.

Grazed from Alibaba Cloud and Red Hat

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise open source operating system developed by the world's leading open source solutions provider Red Hat, is now available globally in the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go basis, bringing more choice and flexibility to customers of both Alibaba Cloud and Red Hat globally.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable foundation for modernizing IT infrastructure, on which enterprises and developers can roll out new applications, virtualize environments and create a hybrid cloud to deploy Red Hat's certified open source solutions. Users can also customize their versions with add-on functionality from Alibaba, including desktop options and developer tools.

Alibaba Cloud and Red Hat entered into a collaboration to leverage each other's infrastructure and solutions in October 2017. Since then, Alibaba Cloud has completed the certification process to officially become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. Being certified means that Alibaba Cloud is recognized as a provider that can offer a safer, scalable, supported and consistent environment for enterprise cloud deployments, as well as Red Hat-tested and validated open source solutions.

Customers of Alibaba Cloud and Red Hat, along with independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers across the globe, can benefit from this collaboration in the following ways:

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today announced the launch of its Malaysia City Brain initiative in collaboration with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), the country's digital economy development agency, and Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL), the city council in the capital, at a ceremony in Kuala Lumpur.

The Malaysia City Brain initiative is a significant milestone because it's the first time for the City Brain solution to be adopted overseas. It is developed on Alibaba Cloud's robust cloud computing infrastructure and will support Malaysia's digital transformation with cloud technology and artificial intelligence.

Powered by Alibaba Cloud's large-scale computing engine Apsara, Malaysia City Brain offers a comprehensive suite of acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a diversity of sources in urban spaces through video and image recognition, data mining and machine learning technology. The power and functionality of the City Brain will enable Malaysian urban planners and city officials to upgrade their city governance and decision-making to turn the city into an intelligent one.

CoreSite Realty Corporation, a premier provider of secure, reliable, high-performance data center and interconnection solutions across the U.S., today announced the availability of connectivity to Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, via the CoreSite Open Cloud Exchange in Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia. 

Customers in Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia can now enjoy a dedicated network connection between their on-premise infrastructure and Alibaba Cloud's secure, reliable and scalable cloud platform. Benefits of direct connectivity to Alibaba Cloud include enhanced security, optimal network performance, and compatibility with the full suite of Alibaba Cloud services including Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Compute Service and Object Storage Service. Importantly, the availability of streamlined access to Alibaba Cloud allows international customers to expand their cloud-based applications worldwide in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group, announced today that it had completed its assessment for the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) set out by the Federal Office for Information Security in Germany, also known as Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI). Alibaba Cloud is the world's first cloud provider to achieve this attestation with the additional requirements. The attestation covers Elastic Compute Service ("ECS"), Relational Database Service ("RDS"), Object Storage Service ("OSS"), Content Delivery Network ("CDN"), Server Load Balancer ("SLB"), Virtual Private Cloud ("VPC") and Alibaba Cloud Security available on Alibaba Cloud's regions in Singapore and Germany.

Alibaba Cloud's commitment to applying the highest levels of compliance in controls and security is shown by meeting the C5 standard that serves not only as a benchmark for the German market, but also increasingly as a benchmark for institutions across Europe. With the attestation, customers in German states can leverage the work performed under this BSI audit to comply with stringent local requirements and operate secure workloads using Alibaba Cloud services.

C5 is intended primarily for professional cloud service providers, their auditors and customers of the cloud service providers. It has 17 distinct control requirements that the cloud providers either have to comply with or meet defined minimum standards. It is a required assessment for working with the public sector in Germany and is being increasingly adopted by the private sector. The philosophy behind C5 is to unify the currently fragmented certification of cloud provisions that are measured against no agreed standards and possess no coherent oversight.

The October 12th announcement that Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba Group has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program came as a shock to some developers, but it seems a smart move as Red Hat already gets more than 12 percent of its profits from Asia, per the 2016 annual report. This strategic partnership could help revenues in Asia top EMEA levels, at 21.26 percent, in only a few years. 

Joining the Red Hat CCSP ensures that Alibaba Cloud, the largest cloud-hosting provider in all of Asia, is ready to deliver a secure and flexible space for development. The enhanced portability of OpenShift.io and performance of Alibaba Cloud's back-end hardware should be very attractive to developers in the quickly growing Asian tech sector. This could mean a wealth of job opportunities, for both expats and teleworkers, but China poses its own risks and hazards for developers to keep in mind.