Alibaba Cloud: Weaving Innovation Inside Fabrics of Communications

Alibaba Cloud is set to bring a lot of innovation inside the fabrics of communications segment – enabling digital transformation for its enterprise customers and partnering with a number of stakeholders in the form of solution providers and telecoms ecosystem partners.

In a unique move, the company has unveiled its smart access gateway in association with China Unicom Global and this opens up great opportunities for the SME and enterprise segment to stay connected with great flexibility on operations.

Smart Access Gateway

In co-operation with China Unicom Global, this market-leading software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) helps enterprise customers, especially rapid developing businesses, to build low-cost network with free maintenance across regions. The product is also user-friendly, and has a shorter investment cycle.

Smart Access Gateway can help retailers to connect their data from different shops to one cloud platform, which can enable them to manage it more effectively especially during data surge scenarios such as in store promotions and discounting scenarios around festive seasons.

At its Cloud Summit - Infinity 2018 in Singapore, Alibaba Cloud has launched a new suite of product offerings in the areas of cloud architecture, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) and security.

These products will be made available on global scale and meet the needs of the retail industry in the region who are looking to digitize their operations under the New Retail concept that marks the seamless integration of online and offline. Alibaba Cloud is poised to strengthen its collaboration with customers and partners across different industries with these new offerings.

The new products fall into a number of inter-related categories. In relation to data technology and AI, Alibaba Cloud is launching two key products – Data Lake Analytics is an effective serverless service for customers to turn their cloud storage data into insights in Data Lake scenario; PAI is Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary machine learning platform that enables customers with limited AI background easy access to Alibaba Cloud’s AI capabilities. IoT Platform, a platform and toolkit will also be introduced to the global market.

Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration. In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch Anti-Bot Service, which is a software solution that protects users from online scalpers and crawlers.

Hybrid Backup Recovery is a cost-effective, easy-to-use online backup service to protect critical business data while Dedicated Host provides customers with regulatory, stability and business standard requirements to enjoy a dedicated hosting service on a public cloud.

Alibaba Cloud invested significant resources in the global market especially Asia Pacific to support the region’s digital transformation, offering a larger range of solutions to local businesses and SMEs.

Last month, the company launched the second Availability Zone and the first cloud based Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Center in Malaysia, providing customers with new levels of protection against DDoS attacks.

Dr Derek Wang, Chief Solution Architect, Alibaba Cloud International said: “Asia Pacific is a unique market, and as a global cloud services provider with an Asian origin, we are committed to leverage our knowledge and experience to build a sustainable regional ecosystem and enrich our offerings to meet the needs of our customers in this digital age. This new suite of offering includes products that are highly efficient, cost effective, and some of them are the first of their kind in the industry.”

Focus on Telecoms

Speaking on the sidelines of Alibaba Cloud Summit – Infinity 2018, Dr Alex Li, General Manager, Alibaba Cloud, informed that the company is looking at telecom operators as its strategic partners and there are a number of areas where the company can cooperate with the telecoms community.

“Alibaba Cloud has been working with a number of telecom operators in terms of driving mutual resources and customer services. In India we already worked with Tata and Reliance for infra services, we are also in touch with other telecom players for other business development including sharing of resources and joint marketing activities,” he explained.

Alibaba Cloud’s partner network is an important strategic asset, as shown by the number of new offerings. With China Unicom Global, Alibaba Cloud is launching Smart Access Gateway that supports a multiple location enterprise network.

Others are Apsara Stack, the next generation hybrid cloud solutions for Asia Pacific, delivered in collaboration with HPE, and Elasticsearch, which is an open source tool developed by Elastic and available on Alibaba Cloud.

The author traveled to Singapore to attend Alibaba Cloud Summit - Infinity 2018 as a guest of Alibaba