Alibaba Cloud unveils roadmap for international business

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence arm of the Alibaba Group has announced its latest international strategic roadmap at the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit. 

During the three-day summit, the cloud provider revealed several new products, 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.

With more enterprises moving to the cloud and increasing demand for cloud services in a hybrid environment, Alibaba Cloud has made its proven infrastructure products available globally, including a multi-model cloud-native database and distributed cloud services. This range of new products aims to provide enterprise customers with a broader scope of cloud services covering network, storage and compute.

Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0, the newly available network service, provides global intelligent networking to support enterprises' international 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.

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.

Alibaba Cloud has also been strengthening its computing, storage, network and security capabilities. 

For example, it recently unveiled Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU), a dedicated processing unit designed for its Apsara Cloud operating system, which can reduce network latency to as low as five microseconds. It also improves computing power performance in data-intensive AI and data analytics scenarios by as much as 30%.

Lastly, CloudBox integrates Alibaba Cloud's public cloud infrastructure technologies to support enterprises' need for a hybrid cloud. It helps enterprises with fully managed cloud services for deployment close to customers' business premises. 

CloudBox is Alibaba Cloud's public cloud, which delivers a consistent experience while meeting enterprises' demand for on-premise data processing and low latency computing. CloudBox is designed for multinational companies with business operations in China.

With its revamped ecosystem strategy, Alibaba Cloud has announced its commitment to invest US$1 billion and support partners' technology innovation and their market expansion with Alibaba Cloud in the coming three fiscal years. This investment consists of financial and non-financial incentives, such as funding, rebates and go-to-market initiatives.

Alibaba Cloud also launched a Regional Accelerator programme to accelerate partners' growth by providing 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. 

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. We are committed to providing them with strong support for our ongoing co-creation and value-addition to empower our joint customers further," says Selina Yuan, Intelligence International President, Alibaba Cloud. 

"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." 

Alibaba Cloud has upgraded its collaboration model with its ISV partners to address complications with partners' international business operations. Its focus is 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.

Alibaba Cloud also launched a Global Delivery and Service Programme to provide all-round cloud-based solutions and services to all customers.

Under the program, it has unveiled three customer service centres in Kuala Lumpur, Porto, and Mexico City, to support customers in their cloud adoption journey, and provide timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services. 

In addition, Alibaba Cloud has set up three service delivery centres in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and Hong Kong to provide extra technology support to its regional offices and customer project delivery in the Asia Pacific, Middle East, Europe and Africa.

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, a Japanese 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 metaverse company, Alibaba Cloud rolled out a comprehensive suite of metaverse solutions for the Thailand market.

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 New Zealand-based blockchain infrastructure provider, to offer robust cloud-computing capability and a solid global network for Web 3.0 developers looking to scale globally.