Alibaba Cloud signs MoU to digitise China’s energy sector

Alibaba Group senior vice president and Alibaba Cloud president Simon Hu and Kongsberg Digital president and KONGSBERG executive vice president Hege Skryseth sign an MoU.

Given gloomy climate change forecasts, renewable energy sources have been attracting huge amounts of investment.

China has been working hard to clean up its image with digitalisation high on the agenda to help improve efficiency and transformed business models.

In a bid to continue closing the gap with its global rivals, Alibaba Cloud announced today that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Kongsberg Digital to tap into the potential opportunities made possible by making KONGSBERG's industrial digital platform, Kognifai, available on Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure.

So what does this mean for business in Asia? According to the group, operating Kognifai on Alibaba Cloud will open up KONGSBERG's solutions for the energy sector within the growing market in China and Asia.

These include IoT, advanced and hybrid analytics – whch will be made available on digital ecosystems to aid in developing and running scalable mission critical software and applications.

To get an idea of the specific KONGSBERG solutions that could become available to customers of Alibaba Cloud, the group have mentioned EmPower, a software suite that is delivered as a service for the wind power industry.

Alibaba Group senior vice president and Alibaba Cloud president Simon Hu says KONGSBERG has already established substantial operations in China, which will help to provide local knowledge and understanding of the processes within the Chinese market.

"Alibaba Cloud has always been dedicated to advancing technologies to empower digital transformation across the globe," says Hu.

"Together with KONGSBERG and Kongsberg Digital, we are looking forward to seeing how our robust cloud infrastructure and their cutting-edge platform can jointly drive the technology advancement to a new level for the energy sector."

The MoU stipulates that the companies will begin working together immediately with the goal to have Kognifai live and available on Alibaba Cloud in 2019.

"Bringing Kognifai to the growing Chinese energy market is an important milestone for Kongsberg Digital," says Kongsberg Digital president and KONGSBERG executive vice president Hege Skryseth.

"By implementing KONGSBERG's Kognifai platform on the Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, we will be able to offer our advanced joined digital solutions to the energy sector in China and other parts of Asia."