Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced that it has supported 38 percent of the Fortune 500 companies last fiscal year. With this milestone, the cloud service provider plans to accelerate its globalization strategy to become the world’s leading digital intelligence backbone in three years.
“We are extremely confident in the future of the global digital economy, especially with the digitalization of healthcare, business, education, leisure and other parts of our lives during the pandemic. As the largest cloud service provider in the Asia Pacific region, we will continue increasing investments in the next three years to strengthen our infrastructure, our solutions and our role in the wider technology ecosystem to be the trusted partner of choice not just in the Asia Pacific but also in the global digital economy by 2023,” said Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Jeff Zhang.
Consistently ranked as the biggest public cloud service provider in the Asia Pacific region and third in the world by all relevant third-party measures in the past several years, Alibaba Cloud’s goal is supported by an unprecedented RMB200 billion ($28 billion) investment plan first announced in April. With this big investment, the company aims to expand and enhance its infrastructure and product portfolio. Apart from expanding service coverage and building even more next-generation data centers around the world, Alibaba Cloud has committed to hiring more than 5,000 staff globally in areas from network, database, servers and chips to artificial intelligence.
In the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud works closely with local ecosystem partners and businesses from various industries to support them in new technology immersion and cloud system adoption. With the recent formation of the Alibaba Cloud Philippines Ecosystem Alliance, the company aims to accelerate the digital transformation of more than 5,000 businesses in the Philippines and train 50,000 local IT professionals by 2023.
To date, Alibaba Cloud operates 63 availability zones in 21 regions around the world, supporting the needs of businesses in more than 200 countries and territories. As the first step of the recent investment plan, Alibaba Cloud will open its third data center and the first data-scrubbing center in Indonesia next year.
Jointly Creating New Solutions for a New Normal
With digitalization as the most fundamental driving force for global economic development and to further promote global economic recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alibaba Cloud has reaffirmed its commitment to broadened support for global companies and toward this end will work with them to co-create the new digital reality.
Beyond the RMB2 billion ($283 million) initiative to accelerate joint-innovation projects with partners during this fiscal year, Alibaba Cloud also plans to elevate its successful China Gateway strategy to serve as the global gateway for international businesses to Asia. The program upgrade will help multinational companies build the overall IT foundation capabilities and optimize enterprise networks through Alibaba Cloud’s one-stop intelligence platform.
“This crisis, along with the pain it is causing, will pass in time. Our foremost concern now is how we can help businesses, large or small, seize the meaningful opportunities in the next phase toward recovery. This is why we at Alibaba Cloud are working closely with our partners in upgrading current processes for the new normal,” added Zhang.
New Products, Services & Solutions to Support Globalization Efforts
As part of the pivot to the new digital paradigm and to help enterprises fast-track their digital transformation journeys, Alibaba Cloud also launched a slate of new and upgraded solutions for the new normal, some available globally for the first time.
These new solutions include the 7th Generation of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) high-frequency product, which is based on the X-Dragon architecture. This solution fuels cloud applications and hosting needs with improved computing power and low latency. It nearly triples the computing power of the previous instance and delivers a 70 percent reduction in storage latency, offering the highest performance-per-dollar rate in the industry. The 7th generation ECS instances are powered by the brand-new Intel Cooper Lake Processor to provide leading computing power.
Other newly launched groundbreaking solutions are the new ApsaraDB for PolarDB, AnalyticsDB (ADB) and Data Lake Analytics (DLA). These new cloud-native database iterations provide even more scalability and reliability, especially for e-commerce and hyper-scale use cases such as Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival. These solutions are capable of managing a peak of 87 million requests per second reached last year while under constant attacks by malicious entities. ApsaraDB for PolarDB also provides the world’s first cloud-native database supporting MySQL 8.0. In the promising digital market of Indonesia, PolarDB has been very well-received by pioneer users, including prominent start-ups Kopi Kenangan, Akulaku and Investree.
Other new products and features that have been recently launched are:
Hologres: First launched in China in June and will soon be made available in Southeast Asia and the U.S. in July, this real-time cloud-native data warehouse provides an enterprise-class unified data storage and real-time analytics service. The product is the world’s first cloud-native Hybrid Serving Analytical Processing (HSAP) system enabling informed and real-time business insights. Its ability to overcome the challenges of analytic and serving workloads empowers business leaders to innovate with greater situational awareness and improves overall business agility. Hologres, Realtime Compute and Maxcompute form the next-generation cloud-native data warehouses of Alibaba Cloud, offering enterprises with unified batch, real-time, serving and analytics solutions together to solve the growing complexity in big data architecture.
Smart Access Gateway (SAG): Available for the first time in Southeast Asia, the all-in-one SD-WAN solution shifts mainstream technology to solve network issues in hybrid cloud environments without configuration difficulties while enjoying quick access from private networks to all Alibaba Cloud services under end-to-end security policies. Companies can use the cloud-native architecture SAG to connect facilities and offices via SAG Device, computers and mobile devices with SAG App, and private networks to the Alibaba Cloud through SAG-vCPE. SAG Device is now available in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, and will soon be rolled out in other markets.
ARMS Prometheus Service: Available for the first time in international markets, this open-source monitoring system and alarm framework collates real-time series data and supports multiple charts and data dashboards. It provides a fully compatible open source experience and supports PromQL, native service discovery and alerting. It solves the pain points of native Prometheus to provide unlimited expansion of cloud storage, high availability and high stability, and very low load of Indicator collection consumption.
EDAS 3.0: Available for the first time in Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, this core product of Alibaba Cloud’s enterprise internet architecture solutions provides enhanced support for Kubernetes and the open-source microservice framework Spring Cloud and Dubbo. It demonstrates Alibaba Cloud’s best practice — “three factors to ensure the safety of production: observable, grayscale and rollback” — which can help users build stable and efficient microservice operating environments in a cloud-native way.
