Telecom Review Asia Pacific interviews Dr Derek Wang, Singapore Country Manager, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, to learn about Alibaba Cloud’s undertakings in the region to bring value to ecosystem partners in their digital innovation journey.
Growth in global cloud markets has outpaced previous years. Can you tell us about Alibaba Cloud’s global reach and key markets in the Asia Pacific?
Alibaba Cloud is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services. Alibaba Cloud maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally in 2021, according to IDC, and is the world’s third largest and Asia Pacific’s leading IaaS provider, according to Gartner’s April 2022 report.
Alibaba Cloud serves more than 4 million customers worldwide and work with close to 10,000 global partners including Salesforce, RedHat, VMware, MongoDB to bring leading solutions to businesses around the world, and it has 84 availability zones across 27 regions globally. In Singapore, Alibaba Cloud owns three data centers locally.
As Asia Pacific is home to many emerging markets, there has been a rise in data centers to tap on its potential in recent years. How is Alibaba Cloud growing its presence and its approach toward supporting digital transformation in this region?
Alibaba Cloud has extensive business presence in Asia Pacific (APAC) countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Japan and Korea, and we also operate our own data centers in these countries. In terms of support local countries digital transformation, we work with local partners in each country closely, to bring products and solutions for customers, and leveraging IT partners’ extensive local expertise to ensure our products meet with customers customization demands. We see great demands for cloud computing services driven by COVID-19 in the region, especially in industries such as F&B, e-commerce, education, logistics, digital entertainment, live streaming, and gaming. With our extensive experience serving international customers and garnering successful experiences from these verticals, we are confident to bring the successful learning to help APAC’s businesses to transform.
In addition, we bring products and solutions overseas to meet local market’s growing demands, too. In Singapore, to boost innovation and increase operational efficiency for enterprises in a hybrid workplace, we have launched cloud computer, our Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) for faster IT deployment and increased device flexibility. The service is especially useful to support companies that have a remote workforce in need to access to heavy computer powered productivity applications in industries like AI research, video production and rendering, engineering and finance modeling, telecommunication, livestreaming, education, oil and gas simulations.
How does Alibaba Cloud enable enterprises to accelerate digital innovation and create value?
Alibaba Cloud offers a slew of digitalization solutions that have been proven successful supporting the various business units of Alibaba Group, including e-commerce, fintech, logistics, and digital media and entertainment. In order to help enterprises complete their digitalization journey, we not only offer our technology know-hows, but also work with our global partners closely to offer world-leading solutions in areas such as customer management, logistics, hybrid cloud, database so that through working with Alibaba Cloud, customers can also have direct access to our wider ecosystem partners’ offerings, and complete their digital innovation journey with us.
In addition, we believe in building an inclusive ecosystem to create better values for our customers and partners alike. In Thailand for instance, we have launched a “Partner Alliance 100” program to recruit local technology and channel partners onboard, so that we can empower them with Alibaba Cloud’s leading solutions and invite them to integrate theirs onto our state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure. We have these kinds of similar partner enablement program in other regions too, in order to accelerate our partners digital innovation capabilities.
How else is Alibaba Cloud supporting regional enterprises and startups to grow and innovate?
Alibaba Cloud launched Project AsiaForward in 2021, and has committed an initial US$1 billion funding and resources to cultivate a million-strong digital talent pool, empower 100,000 developers and support the growth of 100,000 technology startups in the APAC region. The project is part of Alibaba Cloud’s strategy to invest in infrastructure, technological innovation and talent development to contribute to local economic growth through digital transformation as the trusted cloud leader in APAC.
Under the project, Alibaba Cloud has also launched a Global Startup Accelerator, introducing a series of Demo Days in key APAC countries including Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, offering local startups the chance to present their business ideas to investors to win potential investment, as well as to become part of Alibaba Group’s ecosystem.
