Alibaba Cloud unveils several new solutions at MWC
The 2019 MWC in Barcelona has seen no shortage of new innovations from the world's tech giants, and Alibaba Cloud is no exception.
The cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group has launched seven new solutions and two new features for its global customers.
These new products cover a diverse range of demands, including serverless computing, data analytics, global networking, high-performance storage, and enterprise databases that let customers derive actionable business insights.
These new services are part of the technology backbone underpinning Alibaba Group's various business units including retail, fintech, logistics, media and entertainment, and digital branding and marketing. Alibaba Cloud is confident these new capabilities will enable global customers to 'take advantage of the proven, scalable, and secure technologies to accelerate business growth.'
According to Alibaba Cloud, global enterprises and internet startups alike need to quickly derive insights from data and make intelligent business decisions in a timely manner. They typically face challenges managing and analysing data at massive scale and processing real-time streaming data.
It's this portion of the market that Alibaba Cloud is looking to target with its new Realtime Compute solution that can process millions of events/sec and support real-time decision making, such as for fraud detection, social analytics, and QoS monitoring of telco networks.
To help customers manage and analyse large crops of data, Alibaba Cloud introduced the improved DataWorks and MaxCompute 2.0 that can handle processing 100PB/day.
For customers who want to explore unstructured, heterogeneous data sets on-demand, Data Lake Analytics allows them to easily query petabytes of data in serverless fashion with standard SQL and only pay for the amount of data scanned.
"Businesses around the world are increasingly relying on data intelligence to drive innovation, digitalise operations, and delight customers," says Alibaba Cloud International senior staff product manager Henry Zhang.
"We work with customers from many industries along this digital transformation journey. We are keen to turn our proven in-house technology into broadly applicable services and pass the benefits on to customers globally so they can quickly build applications on top, such as for 5G, edge computing, and IOT, and shorten the time-to-market.
In addition to these new data analytics products, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled a number of infrastructure enhancements to support intelligent business on a global scale.
Customers can now deploy enterprise-grade database applications on ApsaraDB for MariaDB TX and use SQL Server Enterprise Always On to deploy enterprise-level high availability and disaster recovery plans.
Customers developing file based high-performance computing workloads such as autonomous driving and scientific discovery can now use Cloud Parallel File System for first-class concurrency and bandwidth.
Finally, Elastic Container Instance allows customers to easily run containers without the hassle of managing servers and clusters; and Global Connection Solution help businesses easily deploy a reliable, low latency global network to support their international business operations.
"We believe in a virtuous cycle of building world-class infrastructure, deploying intelligent applications on that architecture, and using real-time analytics to make data-driven decisions," says Alibaba Cloud EMEA general manager Yeming Wang.
"In addition, we offer robust cross-border solutions for enterprises and ecosystem partners who are looking to expand globally and into the rapidly growing Asian markets. These proven and compliant solutions are already used by Alibaba Group and we hope our customers can leverage our expertise to create more differentiated value for their end-customers.
These solutions have already been made available in China - with positive results according to Alibaba Cloud - and are now being made available to international customers.
