Alibaba has been known for its large e-commerce empire, somewhat similar to Amazon. In 2009, Alibaba Cloud was founded as a set of cloud services for customers worldwide. Now, it includes features such as elastic computing, databases, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, application and management services, big data analytics, and a machine learning platform.
Over time, it has functioned as the backbone of the Alibaba Group, making it the world’s third-largest public cloud provider today. It has generated a large network of allies, so it currently works with around eleven thousand partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM, and Neo4j.
During the Alibaba Cloud 2022 Summit, the group announced its strategic roadmap. It unveiled new products to support technology innovation among enterprises with a $1 billion investment for a global partner ecosystem upgrade. As a result, the company will have enhanced customer service, which they claim to provide “end-to-end support throughout a customer’s digitization journey.”
Technology innovation among enterprises
Today, most companies are moving to the cloud, in addition to the growing public demand for these services. This is why Alibaba Cloud has made available a number of its proven infrastructure products, a multi-model cloud-native database, and distributed cloud services. In this way, they hope to give enterprise customers a wider range of services.
Cloud Enterprise Network 2.0 is the name of the new network services available which have features such as higher security capability and lower latency. It supports ultra-large-scale network capabilities with more availability, and the pricing for enterprises is more flexible compared to the past version.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced other services such as a storage product called ESSD Auto PL, which provides block storage and supports automatic scaling in seconds for enterprises to cope with traffic surges. Similarly, they introduced ACK One (Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform), a multi-region, multi-cluster container management platform to provide consistent management, delivery, and operation experience for enterprises.
Global partner ecosystem
The company announced that it will invest $1 billion to “support partner technology innovation and market expansion with Alibaba Cloud over the next three fiscal years.” They assured that this investment would have financial and non-financial incentives, such as funding, rebates, and go-to-market initiatives.
Selina Yuan, International President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, stated, “Partners have always been a key focus for Alibaba Cloud, and we are committed to providing them with strong support for our continued co-creation and value-add – both technologically and commercially – to further empower our united customers.” He also said the revamped partner strategy prioritizes business growth, seeking to create an inclusive ecosystem that “benefits partners and customers.”
On Wall Street, analysts are bullish on Alibaba shares. Their rating for BABA stock is a “Strong Buy”, with 17 buys and just one sell. The average price target is $156.12, and it has an upside potential of 99.4% from current prices.
What do you think of Alibaba Cloud’s new strategic roadmap? Would you invest in the Chinese company’s stock?
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