Alibaba Cloud unveils strategic roadmap for international business

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence 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 has revealed new products to support technology innovation among enterprises, an investment of USD 1 billion for a global partner ecosystem upgrade, and enhanced customer services to provide comprehensive support throughout a customer’s digitalization journey.  

“Thailand is entering the era of advanced digital economy in which the robust transformation of its digital ecosystem is inevitable. Driven by the force of industry 4.0, Thailand sees promising developments such as the explosion of data utilization, expansion of smart ecosystem, and rise in e-commerce. As the progress in all digital domains increases, issues such as shortage in digital workforce and impact on the climate are also on the rise,” said Dr. Passakon Prathombutr, Senior Executive Vice President of Digital Economy Promotion Agency. “We are pleased to see the contribution of a cutting-edge company like Alibaba Cloud whose commitment to supporting Thailand will be helpful in addressing the challenges we face.” 

Fueling new 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. 

Together with MetaverseXR, Thailand’s leading metaverse company, Alibaba Cloud rolled out a comprehensive suite of metaverse solution for the Thai market in order to fulfil the growing demand locally to embark on a web3.0 journey. With True IDC, the leading data center and cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to deep-dive in cloud computing technologies to foster digital transformation of Thai businesses and to power Thailand 4.0. Alibaba Cloud and Thai Fintech Association (TFA) also forged a partnership to empower local fintech start-ups and incumbents with the latest insights and technology to support their digital innovations.

“We reiterate our commitment to the Thai market by continuing to expand our partner ecosystem to support our customers,” said Tyler Qiu, Thailand Country Manager, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “We are grateful to the trust and support given to us by our Thai partners customers and we will continue to innovate and bring the best technology solutions to support their digital transformation.”

“By partnering with Alibaba Cloud, we are confident that we can push the technology innovation boundaries further,” said Mr. Theerapun Charoensak, General Manager, True IDC. “Alibaba Cloud, as one of the largest cloud service providers in the world, we believe our partnership with Alibaba Cloud will help accelerate Thailand’s digitalization journey with our know-how experience and specialization.”

Prioritizing partner benefits to build inclusive technology ecosystem

With its revamped ecosystem strategy, Alibaba Cloud has annouced 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 fundings, 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, with an aim to boost partners’ income and strengthen their technical expertise. Alibaba Cloud ecosystem partners including resellers, technology partners (ISV, SaaS and SI), 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 opertions, Alibaba Cloud has also upgraded its collaboration model with its ISV partners, with a focus on enhancing industry collaboration, standardizing 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

In order 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 Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Europe, and Africa.

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 compute. They are: 

• Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0, that supports ultra-large-scale networking capabilities with higher availability, lower latency, and enhanced security

• ESSD Auto PL, a storage product which provides block storage services and supports automatic scaling within seconds to allow businesses to handle sudden traffic surges.

• Lindorm, Alibaba Cloud’s self-proprietary cloud-native multi-model database, designed for fusion-processing requirements for wide tables, time series, space-time, and various unstructured data.

• ACK One (Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform), a multi-region and multi-cluster container management platform to provide a consistent management, delivery, and operation experience for enterprises. Earlier this year, among the eight significant industry players evaluated, Alibaba Cloud was named a “Leader” in The Forrester WaveTM Public Cloud Container Platforms Q1 2022 for the first time.