“From Cloud to Cloud Intelligence” – Alibaba Cloud Outlines Strategic Upgrade after a Decade of Success

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing and data intelligence arm of Alibaba Group, unveiled at its Beijing Summit the new strategy to develop the company into a more technologically inclusive platform. Jeff Zhang, President of Alibaba Cloud and Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Group, for the first time elaborated publicly on the strategic upgrade of the business – evolving to serve as a key component of the Alibaba Business Operating System, and empowering customers and ecosystem partners to win in the digital era. Over 3,000 ecosystem partners and industry practitioners attending the Summit have shared the development journey of the company over the past 10 years.

Cloud computing is becoming the main business focus of Alibaba Group and over the past decade Alibaba Cloud has been the technology and public cloud platform underpinning the entire Alibaba economy from e-commerce and payment, to logistics and supply chain management. The scalability, reliability, and security of Alibaba Cloud are paramount to the business and the platform has successfully sustained real-world tests on a daily basis, most notably during the Alibaba 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, the scale of which provides one of the biggest stress tests possible. Businesses of all sizes have leveraged these proven successes to grow and innovate in China and overseas.

Becoming an enabler of SaaS

“Alibaba has championed cloud computing in China over the past 10 years and has been at the forefront of rapid technology development. Today, Alibaba Cloud not only provides infrastructural support to the entire Alibaba economy but has also developed proven technologies to empower millions of customers in China and worldwide, significantly lowering cloud adoption barriers, ensuring inclusive access, and enabling collaboration throughout the ecosystem,” said Jeff Zhang.

“In the future, our highly compatible and standards-based platform will allow SaaS partners to onboard easily and thrive. The offerings will also be enriched by our continued investment in research through the Damo Academy, that will align data science with the development of our products. To empower all participants in our ecosystem, we will boost the integrated development of technology, products and services on our open platform,” he added.

Alibaba Cloud is the IaaS market leader in China with a larger share than the sum of the second to eighth players. The development of the IaaS market meant that in 2018, the cost of technology adoption for businesses in China has reduced significantly compared to 10 years ago.

New product launches to facilitate cloud adoption in China

Adoption of the cloud is expected to continue and become more immersive in the traditional sectors across China. The importance of digital intelligence will become more apparent as enterprises need to derive deeper business insights, make data-driven decisions, and take real-time actions. Alibaba Cloud will continue to invest in technological research and development, ensuring that the company has the capability to offer powerful computing and Internet-based technology products for the further adoption of cloud and data intelligence.

Over the past decade, Alibaba Cloud has developed 162 products and activated 4,610 product features and functions, an average of more than one a day. At the summit, the company announced a full suite of new products in China, with 3 highlights – a super-computing product, a cloud-native database as well as the accelerator to boost the SaaS ecosystem:

• X-dragon Super-Computing Cluster instance SCC-GN6: The most powerful super-computing bare-metal server instance launched by the company to date, with the capability to enhance the cluster performance by more than 100%. This new instance provides 50 Gbps of RDMA networking throughput, 96 custom Intel Skylake vCPUs, 8 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, providing a total of 1000 TFlops to computational throughput, and high-performance parallel file system CPFS with 1TB/s R/W throughput. SCC-GN6 supports supercomputing scenarios such as autonomous driving, machine interpretation, natural language processing and recommendation systems.
• PolarDB: A cloud-native relational database service that is designed for enterprise-grade database applications. PolarDB is compatible with Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL and offers excellent scalability with the architecture of hardware-software co-design. It can scale up to 88vCPUs and 710GB of memory and allows customers to pay for usage by the minute, enabling customers to handle a business peak traffic while minimizing cost. It can also scale up to 100TB in storage which helps customers cope with big data development.
• SaaS Accelerator: A highly efficient and agile platform where ecosystem partners can easily build and launch SaaS applications and leverage Alibaba’s proven business and technology know-how. The accelerator helps SaaS customers quickly deploy and test their applications on the cloud, shorten the implementation lifecycle, and accelerate time-to-market. It features an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface and launch kit while remaining highly compatible with other application programming interfaces (APIs). With the accelerator, a smart SaaS application can go live in as little as five days.

For more information about 2019 Beijing Alibaba Cloud Summit and to view Jeff Zhang’s keynote speech from the event, go to: https://yunqi.youku.com/2019/beijing/meeting