Alibaba Cloud to invest $283 million to accelerate global partnership

MUMBAI: Alibaba Cloud on Tuesday said it will invest RMB 2 billion (US$283 million) this fiscal to empower global partners and accelerate joint innovations in the post pandemic era.

With the investment, Alibaba Cloud aims to introduce new and improved work process with partners to increase communication efficiency so that parties can respond quickly to changing customer demands, especially during black swan events such as covid-19 pandemic.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud infrastructure backbone of Alibaba Group, works with close to 10,000 global partners serving more than 350,000 business customers worldwide. It has invested heavily in research and development, enabling partners to integrate their products and services on the infrastructure platform, so that customers can benefit from the joint solutions for faster time to market.

With partners such as MongoDB, Intel, VMware, Salesforce, SAP, Red Hat and Fortinet, Alibaba Cloud has created more than 500 joint solutions catering to industries such as new retail, fintech, manufacturing, media and entertainment.

India is one of the fastest growing global cloud markets after China and Indonesia, and currently attracts investments from all top cloud providers. While Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud offer two cloud regions in India at present, the cloud service market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure offer three regions. Google Cloud and Alibaba have roughly 6% each of the global cloud infrastructure market.

Alex Li, general manager, Alibaba Cloud, South Asia, said, “Alibaba Cloud has cultivated strategic partnerships with Global System Integrators like Infosys to drive business growth in India, China, and the rest of the world. We are committed to working and cultivating partnerships with Global System Integrators across several areas including sales, delivery, technology and services.”

Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud hopes to broaden independent software vendor, managed service provider, system integrator partner recruitment, leveraging their innovation and technology capabilities to enhance their platform offering for customers.