Global cloud leader aims to be the world’s leading digital intelligence backbone by 2023

HANGZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, said today it has supported 38 percent of the Fortune 500 companies over the past fiscal year.

With this milestone, the cloud service provider plans to accelerate its globalization strategy, aiming 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 towards being the trusted partner of choice not just in Asia Pacific, but for the global digital economy by 2023,” said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, at the Alibaba Cloud Summit 2020 event.

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 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 also committed to hiring a further 5,000 staff globally in areas from network, database, servers and chips to artificial intelligence.

To date, Alibaba Cloud operates 63 availability zones in 21 regions around the world, supporting the needs of businesses in over 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 will work with them to co-create the new digital reality.

Beyond a 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 into Asia. The program upgrade will help multinational companies build the overall IT foundation capabilities and optimize enterprise network 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 towards recovery, and we are working closely with our partners to comprehensively upgrade 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.

New solutions include the 7th Generation of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) high-frequency product, which is based on the X-Dragon architecture to fuel cloud applications and hosting needs with improved computing power and low latency. The solution nearly triples the computing power of the previous instance and delivers 70% 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.

Another groundbreaking solution unveiled during the summit is the new ApsaraDB for PolarDB, AnalyticsDB (ADB) and Data Lake Analytics (DLA). These new cloud-native database iterations will provide even more scalability and reliability, especially for e-commerce and hyper-scale use cases like Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, capably managing a peak of 87 million requests per second reached last year while under constant attacks by malicious entities. ApsaraDB for PolarDB will also provide 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 unveiled during the summit include:

Hologres: First launched in China in June and will be soon 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 situation 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 repositions mainstream technology to solve network issues in hybrid cloud environments without the hassle of configuration 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 be rolled out to other markets soon.

ARMS Prometheus Service: Available for the first time to the 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, 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, and a core product of Alibaba Cloud’s enterprise Internet architecture solutions, EDAS 3.0 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 safety of production" -- observable, grayscale, and rollback, which can help users build stable and efficient microservice operating environments in a cloud-native way.

This year’s edition of the Alibaba Cloud Summit, The Pulse of Digitalization, is held virtually and anticipated to host thousands of participants from around the world. High-profile business leaders and experts will share more about the current and future ramifications of COVID-19 along with measures to rebound and prosper post-crisis, and how Alibaba Cloud plans to transform and rejuvenate the global and regional economic landscape.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com), the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is among the world’s top three IaaS providers, according to Gartner. It is also the largest provider of public cloud services in China, according to IDC. Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services. Alibaba Cloud is the official Cloud Services Partner of the International Olympic Committee.