Alibaba Cloud releases new products and pledges $1 billion to boost global alliances

Alibaba Cloud announces its commitment to push for more global partnerships with technology innovations and fiscal incentives.

The rate of cloud adoption among enterprises has been on the rise globally. As a result, more cloud service companies continue to come up with cloud technology solutions that can help businesses run efficiently. This development coincides with the cloud market report by Precedence Research, which revealed that the global cloud computing market size is expected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030.

With this trend, it is no surprise that Alibaba Cloud, the world’s third-largest public cloud provider, according to Gartner, has announced the release of a new series of cloud infrastructure products, a multi-model cloud-native database and distributed cloud services. In addition to the new products, the Chinese cloud and e-commerce giant also pledged a $1 billion investment to boost its global alliances.

Cloud innovation to boost the growing cloud ecosystem

The new products by Alibaba Cloud are all geared towards providing businesses with an expansive range of cloud services like cloud storage, networks and computing. With an expansion in mind, Alibaba Cloud intends to provide service to all critical parts of the cloud ecosystem with different product lines.

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During the launch, Alibaba announced the release of Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0. It says that CEN 2.0 will bring large-scale networking features to enterprises, provide lower latency and reinforce security.

Also on the list of products launched by Alibaba Cloud is the ESSD Auto PL, a storage technology product designed to provide block storage services and automatic scaling that allows businesses to handle sudden traffic. Additionally, to support cloud container services, Alibaba Cloud also introduced a Distributed Cloud Container Platform – ACK One. This global and multi-cluster solution provides enterprises with container management and operation. The ACK One is also built to help customers with data disaster recovery, resource scheduling and application delivery through a unified platform regardless of whether you’re operating in a private, public or on-premise cloud environment.

Another product that will interest cloud-driven businesses is Alibaba Cloud Lindorm, a cloud-native multi-model database. According to Alibaba, this cloud database product can support databases of any scale.

In this recent launch, Alibaba Cloud also accentuated its commitment to the hybrid cloud with its CloudBox product. This technology will integrate with the public cloud infrastructure to support enterprises with fully managed cloud services. The aim is to let customers deploy cloud resources close to their business premises.

Driving cloud innovation through partnerships

Partnerships have largely driven technology innovation and global collaborations among tech companies, and Alibaba Cloud is not slowing down in committing itself to such partnerships. According to Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President, “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 customers.”

Some of the notable partnerships during the launch is a collaboration with JP Games, a Japanese game development studio. This collaboration is geared towards supporting JP Games in game development. In a similar development, Alibaba Cloud is not turning a blind eye to metaverse development as it revealed that it’s working with MetaverseXR, a Thailand-based metaverse company. This move may not be unconnected with the recent grand opening of the Thailand Metaverse Expo 2022. The event marked Thailand’s desire to bring players in the metaverse, blockchain, Web 3.0, NFT and other technology stacks together to enhance digital transformation in the country.

Alibaba Cloud also stated that it has partnered with UMG Group in Myanmar to help drive the country’s digital transformation – especially in traditional industries. In addition, further driving into the Asian technological market, Alibaba Cloud has partnered with BeLive and VisionTech from Singapore, with a vision to play a supporting role in the media and Fintech services in the country.

In another partnership drive beyond Asia, Alibaba Cloud announced its collaboration with OnFinality, a New Zealand-based blockchain infrastructure provider. The partnership aims to offer the firm cloud-computing capability and a strong global network for Web 3.0.

The $1 billion initiative

Alibaba Cloud’s $1 billion initiative reflects its commitment for action in technology innovation and will help its market expansion in the coming years. In what was tagged the “Regional Accelerator” program, the company intends to support partners operating in various tech markets with a localized business collaboration model.

Alibaba Cloud currently has about 11,000 partners across the globe, including VMware, Fortinet, Salesforce, Neo4j, IBM, NVIDIA, Aryaka, Docker and Red Hat.

Trailing both Microsoft and Amazon in Gartner’s 2021 market research, Alibaba Cloud hopes to spread its footprint to more regions in the coming years to remain a big player in the cloud market. While a 9.5% global market share is notable, Alibaba Cloud’s announcement of a $1 billion support initiative and more regional collaborations may well push its fortunes further in the cloud computing market.