New Alibaba Cloud initiative to push retail growth in Asia Pacific

Singapore, Aug 16  In a bid to push retail growth in the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud has launched a dedicated partner programme across Asean countries to drive new opportunities in the regional Cloud ecosystem.

Called "ASEAN Partner Alliance Programme," the initiative aims to empower technology vendors, service providers, system integrators, independent software vendors (ISVs) and start-ups to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. 

At its "Infinity 2018" summit here on Wednesday, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, also announced it will recruit 150 solution partners and train 600 sales and technology personnel in the next 12 months to fuel the growth of the ecosystem.

"Asia Pacific is a unique market, and as a global cloud services provider with an Asian origin, we are committed to leverage our knowledge and experience to build a sustainable regional ecosystem and enrich our offerings to meet the needs of our customers in this digital age," said Derek Wang, Chief Solution Architect, Alibaba Cloud International. 

Alibaba Cloud also launched nine products to support global digital transformation across industries.

"This new suite of offering includes products that are highly efficient, cost effective, and some of them are the first of their kind in the industry," Wang added.

In the field of data technology and AI, Alibaba Cloud launched two key products -- Data Lake Analytics and PAI.

PAI is China's first publicly available Machine Learning (ML) platform. It offers a suite of tools and AI software algorithms that allows businesses without an AI background to make practical use of Alibaba Cloud's AI program.

Alibaba Cloud also launched an "Anti-Bot Service" which is a software solution to protect users from online scalpers and crawlers. 

Hybrid Backup Recovery is a cost-effective, easy-to-use online backup service to protect critical business data while Dedicated Host provides customers with regulatory, stability and business standard requirements to enjoy a dedicated hosting service on a Public Cloud.

"E-commerce is witnessing considerable growth and Alibaba Cloud, leveraging Alibaba Group's development, can offer a mature ecosystem to support the regional retail sector," said Wang.

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is among the world's top three Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers.