Alibaba Cloud invests US$283mn globally to piggyback on partner-driven innovations

Alibaba Cloud looks to ramp up its joint innovation efforts by investing US$283 million in its partner ecosystem during the current fiscal. The cloud provider plans to take a deep-dive into the burgeoning demands from the segments like retail, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, and education and believes that the new investment will help it bring its partners up to speed in terms of building new capabilities and developing joint solutions for these segments.

With the investment, Alibaba Cloud aims to introduce new and improved work process with partners, increase communication efficiency, so that they can respond quickly to changing customer demands that arose during the current COVID-19 crisis. A close collaboration and co-creation drive with partners like MongoDB, Intel, VMware, Salesforce, SAP, Red Hat, and Fortinet has helped Alibaba Cloud widen its solutions portfolio with more than 500 industry-specific solutions already.  

“COVID-19 crisis has created an increased demand for online shopping, gaming, instant messaging, remote working tools, etc. At this point, the opportunity for Alibaba Cloud is to help our partners and customers to keep business going even during a crisis like this and help them innovate faster to counter the impact of the pandemic on businesses. We want to bring even more opportunities to our partners so that we can collaboratively innovate to bring the most up-to-date services to our customers, and generate business success for them,” said Lancelot Guo, VP of Alibaba Group, and GM of Ecosystem and Sales Operations, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.   

Alibaba Cloud has delivered more than 2,000 hybrid cloud projects last year in collaboration with global partners. Its existing partner ecosystem comprises 10,000 global partners serving more than 350,000 business customers worldwide.  

Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud aims to broaden ISV, MSP, SI partner recruitment, enhance its partner Go-To-Market (GTM) incentives, leverage their technology, network and innovation capabilities to enhance its platform offering for customers.  

Giving more details about the ways Alibaba Cloud is leveraging its partner network in India, Alex Li, General Manager – South Asia, Alibaba Cloud said, “We work with partners such as ZNet and Infosys and focus on a wide range of customers in the e-commerce, gaming, e-learning, and media and entertainment industries. Our strategic partnerships with global SIs like Infosys Indian companies in their global expansion drive and helping them carry through the technology infrastructure, sales, delivery, and services processes.”

It is also looking to bring some unique benefits to its customers through its global partner network. “For instance, customers who are using MongoDB via Alibaba Cloud as compared to other cloud service providers can enjoy the most updated MongoDB software one year in advance. This gives them flexibility and opportunity in leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s partner ecosystem for business development,” said Li.

In addition to this new investment speeding up the partner-driven innovation efforts, Alibaba is aggressively ramping up its cloud infrastructure and customer enablement efforts across the world.  The cloud provider has announced to invest US$28 billion in building next-gen cloud technology infrastructure and also committed cloud solutions worth over US$30mn to SMEs to help them run the business as usual amid the COVID-19 crisis.