About two months ago, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a new server chip that’s based on advanced 5-nanometer technology. It was dubbed as China’s most advanced chip, a milestone in the country’s pursuit of semiconductor self-sufficiency. The tech giant did not stop there. Adding on to its in-house chip collection, Alibaba apparently has just developed the world’s first, DRAM-based 3D chip that merges logic and memory.

According to Chinese news outlet Pandaily, through a now-deleted post on Chinese social networking site Weibo, Alibaba through its DAMO (Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook) Academy has successfully developed a 3D stacked in-memory computing (IMC) chip that can help overcome the von Neumann bottleneck, a limitation in chip speed resulting from the CPU needing to wait for data to be delivered from memory.

The new chip apparently also meets the needs of artificial intelligence (AI) and other scenarios for large bandwidth, high capacity memory, and extreme computing power. In one specific AI test,  the chip improved regular performance by over 10 times.

Clarifying on the chip since the post was deleted shortly after it was posted on Weibo, Alibaba told The Register that the breakthrough chip exists but they declined to provide additional details.

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For context, computers have been designed according to the von Neumann architecture for the past 70 years. Through this architecture, programs and data are held in a memory unit, while the CPU works as a separate unit. Because the memory and processor are separated, data needs to be moved back and forth between the two, making latency unavoidable.

Now,  given the development of advanced processors that can operate much faster than data can be fed to them, the von Neumann model can get quite challenging. At this point, the computing power of processors is increasing at a rate of about 3.1 times every two years. Memory performance however is only rising at a rate of about 1.4 times during the same period.

Reports indicated Alibaba Cloud believes that IMC is the best way to solve these problems. In fact, Alibaba believes this new architecture could be used in virtual/augmented reality, astronomical data calculation, unmanned driving, remote sensing data analysis, and other scenarios in the future.

Alibaba has been part of a growing cohort of technology companies in China venturing further into semiconductors, partly spurred by President Xi Jinping’s goal of achieving self-sufficiency in high-tech sectors. 

To recall, search-engine operator Baidu in August announced it has begun mass production of its artificial intelligence chips, while handset maker Xiaomi is pushing into similar ventures. In the West, tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla are all shunning established chip firms and bringing certain aspects of chip development in-house, based on company announcements and media reports.

The post The newest chip by Alibaba is the world’s first – here’s why appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Yitian 710 will be used in new servers, named Panjiu, and is designed to further boost its cloud computing business. This would in turn allow Alibaba to compete against US cloud rivals like Amazon, Microsoft, and others.

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With cloud adoption gaining traction, the cloud company now plans to expand its footprint in the Asia Pacific region by setting up data centers in South Korea and Thailand in 2022. The data centers will serve as intelligence backbones to support the nations’ digital economies, and businesses on their journey to transform and innovate.

Alibaba Cloud currently has 24 regional data centers globally, including China North, China South, China East, US West, US East, Europe, United Kingdom, Middle East, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, India, and Indonesia. In July, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of its first data center in the Philippines by the end of this year. The objective is to extend the reach of its services including elastic compute, databases, security, machine learning, and data analytics.

In South Korea, Alibaba Cloud is expected to enable local businesses of all sizes to deploy mission-critical workloads while enjoying more reliable and secure cloud services with lower latencies. Meanwhile, for Thailand, the data center will offer products and solutions that are in line with Thailand 4.0, the Thai government’s 20-year strategy to promote digital innovation and the development of sustainable technologies.

(Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP)

Enabling the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem

Apart from the opening of new data centers, Alibaba Cloud has also unveiled technologies, products, and solutions to make the public cloud more accessible to enterprises and developers by enhancing its security, availability and improving its adaptability in both cloud-native and on-premise environments.

This includes its fourth generation of ApsaraCompute Shenlong Architecture that carries leading capabilities in terms of container elasticity, storage, Input/output (IO) performance, latency, and chip-level security hardening features.

The self-developed Shenlong architecture is upgraded to support data-intensive applications. Its storage Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) increased by 300% to three million IOPS, whereas its network Packets Per Second (PPS) increased by more than 100% to 50 million PPS, while at the same time, the storage and network IO latencies are decreased to as low as 30 and 16 microseconds respectively.

Alibaba Cloud also unveiled the industry’s only large-scale Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking capability with a latency as low as 5 microseconds to further accelerate data-intensive applications on the cloud. For example, the updated Shenlong architecture with RDMA can increase the computing performance in data-intensive AI and big data spark scenarios by 30% compared to the mainstream performance of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) network on the cloud.

For enterprises using the hybrid cloud, a new database platform called DBStack (based on Kubernetes) can bring cloud-native database systems to enterprises’ on-premise environments. With DBStack, businesses that are not ready to migrate fully onto the public cloud can still enjoy the benefits of public cloud securely and conveniently in their on-premise environment, bolstering the digitalization process for finance, transportation, and telco industries.

PolarDB, Alibaba’s commercial cloud-based relational database product has also been upgraded to showcase the leading cloud-native database that marks three levels of separation, with further decoupling of memory and CPU cores. The three independent layers can be scaled up or down independently with increased elasticity and better availability and scalability.

The rise of data centers in Asia Pacific

This move by Alibaba Cloud is expected to see more growth in data centers by large cloud providers in the APAC region.

Recently, AWS announced plans to open an infrastructure region in New Zealand in 2024. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) and join the existing 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic AWS Regions at launch. The Region will be owned and operated by a local AWS entity in New Zealand. Globally, AWS has announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the new AWS Region in New Zealand.

To recall, Google Cloud Platform in Jakarta opened last year. With lower latency access to data and applications, companies doing business in Indonesia can accelerate their digital transformation through the new data center. It will also help customers meet specific regulatory and compliance requirements and provide more disaster recovery options for customers across APAC. The region has three Cloud zones from the start, enabling high availability workloads. With this region, Google Cloud now offers 24 regions and 73 zones across 17 countries worldwide.

Other cloud providers and tech companies have also continued to invest heavily in data centers in APAC to ensure they can provide customers with the best solutions. While there are concerns about the amount of energy being used by these data centers, most vendors have opted to use more green energy when designing the new centers.

In fact, some vendors are looking towards green data centers. A green data center primarily operates on solar, wind, or hydropower, and the components are designed for maximum energy efficiency and minimal carbon footprint. Some of the typically used components include energy-conserving power supply, centralized humidification, efficient servers, routers, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), and light-emitting diode (LED) systems.

For businesses hoping to reduce their carbon footprint, Alibaba Cloud’s new energy-saving solution offers tools to help customers track carbon emissions, analyze energy consumption, predict electricity generation from new energy sources, and receive recommendations for carbon emission reduction plans and related trading mechanisms.

The post Alibaba Cloud is bringing more data centers to Thailand and Korea by 2022 appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

As part of an aggressive US$1 billion plan to expand its presence across Southeast Asia, Alibaba Cloud will be launching its first data center in the Philippines by the end of this year. The objective is to extend the reach of its services including elastic compute, databases, security, machine learning, and data analytics.

The new data center will be constructed in the capital Manila and bring the company’s total number of availability zones or data centers to 76, spread across 25 regions worldwide. The Chinese cloud service provider said, “Local businesses across sectors such as financial technology, e-commerce, education, and media will be able to adopt and implement cloud technologies more efficiently, and better position themselves to capture the emerging opportunities in the country.”

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence’s general manager for Hong Kong, Macau, and the Philippines Leo Liu added that the company looks forward to building out the cloud ecosystem in the Philippines and contributing to the digital economy in Asia, leveraging the synergy with other hubs in the region.

Just last year, the cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group announced the formation of the Philippines Ecosystem Alliance to help fast-track the digitalization of local businesses and support the government’s cloud-first policy. The company also aims to train 50,000 local IT professionals and help 5,000 businesses migrate online by 2023.

This is amidst Alibaba’s Project AsiaForward that has an initial US$1 billion in funding and resources to “cultivate a million-strong digital talent pool” across the Asia Pacific region. The Project also aims to empower 100,000 developers and the growth of 100,000 technology startups in the region over the next three years.

Along with the Philippines’ data center, Alibaba Cloud also announced the building of a third data center in Indonesia and an innovation center in Malaysia. Alibaba Cloud Intelligence general manager of international business unit Selina Yuan added “Our strategic roadmap for APAC includes targeted investments to facilitate the digital transformation of local businesses. We see these investments as all the more timely given the impact of the pandemic and the sharp rise in demand for digital business tools.

Equally important is our focus on talent development and nurturing a digitally-competent workforce, which we see as a key challenge for many businesses to overcome going forward.”

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This year has seen Alibaba’s cloud unit finally become profitable, but the company recently acknowledged that it had lost a large international cloud customer, widely rumored to be TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. The company also recently unveiled a new service to help global online merchants set up their live streaming platforms.  The e-commerce giant was one of the first to popularize Livestream shopping and now it wants to capitalize on its expertise as the model gains popularity outside of China. Livestream shopping took off in China in 2019. By the end of 2020, the model quickly attracted 388 million shoppers, more than a third of China’s 989 million internet users.

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Alibaba Cloud is piloting its new ecosystem strategy in the Philippines, as more and more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country pivot to adopting digital services in response to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Government-imposed lockdowns to curb the pandemic have accelerated digital transformation among businesses across a wide swath of industries. Migrating operations and services to the cloud took on a new urgency for enterprises, and Alibaba Cloud started seeing sizable growth in the country.

Philippines is currently the country in Southeast Asia with the second-highest number of active coronavirus cases, and the uncertainty of the health situation has prompted many Filipino firms to invest in cloud strategy as a longer term solution.

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is offering a range of cloud computing services to companies of varying size worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, startups, corporations, and public services.

Alibaba Cloud is introducing the new digital ecosystem strategy in the Philippines following the establishment of the Philippines Ecosystem Alliance two months ago. The alliance is a joint initiative between Alibaba Cloud and its local ecosystem partners to spotlight cloud adoption, and the use of data analytics intelligence to help businesses to streamline their transformation goals plus new innovations to improve their market presence.

“The Philippines is a booming market with a big group of the young and digital-savvy population,” said Leo Liu, the general manager of Hong Kong, Macau, Korea and Philippines for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “There is a strong demand for digital transformation in accordance with the local government’s ‘cloud-first’ initiative. We have established local team and business coverage in the Philippines and will continue to invest in the country.”

Currently, Alibaba Cloud has over 20 local partners in the Philippines (part of its global from across the industry spectrum such as in retail, fintech, media, information communications technology (ICT), business process outsourcing (BPO), healthcare, and education.

It plans to support 5,000 businesses in the Philippines on their digital migration journeys by the end of 2023. Alibaba Cloud also hopes to train 50,000 and certify at least 10,000 IT professionals within the next three years.

Gartner data shows Alibaba Cloud as the biggest cloud services provider in Asia and third biggest globally, and is currently working with close to 10,000 partners to serve 350,000 businesses worldwide, and previously announced a $283 million investment in this fiscal year to further empower global partners and to accelerate joint innovations with them.

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“We have been serving large, small, and medium enterprises — and even individual developers — with our technology services, which enable them to accelerate their businesses digital operations,” said Lancelot Guo, the VP of Alibaba Group and the president of Ecosystem and Sales Operations, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, during a media conference held at the sidelines of Apsara Conference 2020.

“We see the cloud as a digital transformation vehicle or infrastructure essential for businesses to survive and overcome the effects of the pandemic,” Guo said.

The post Alibaba Cloud’s new digital ecosystem strategy targeting Philippine SMEs appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

While it is still losing money, those losses are narrowing. The Chinese tech giant’s cloud unit has been growing at a brisk pace with triple-digit growth over the last three years, making it more apparent that it will soon be the company’s profit engine.

This is amidst its growing market presence, not only with a firm hold over Asia but also as one of the top five cloud providers worldwide.

According to Alibaba chief financial officer Maggie Wu Wei, the Hangzhou-based unit –  which is ranked by Gartner as the world’s third-biggest infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider in 2019, behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp’s Azure – is expected to turn a profit by the end of March next year.

The cloud unit is also hinting at a promising growth of 60% with strategies that target new workloads and industries, and is ready to invest 200 billion yuan (US$29.36 billion) in its cloud infrastructure over the next three years.

To put things into perspective, Alibaba’s cloud services revenue reached 12.3 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion) in the second quarter, up 59% from a year ago, on the back of more than three million paying customers.

The continuous growth has, in turn, placed Alibaba Cloud as China’s most significant cloud computing services provider as well as the company’s second-largest revenue contributor behind its core e-commerce operations. 

Also, Alibaba Cloud has more than three million paying enterprises, representing 8% of Alibaba’s total sales, and is hitting a US$7 billion annual revenue run rate.

The cloud arm currently operates in 21 data center regions and 63 global availability zones. It is primarily focused on areas in mainland China and other Asia-Pacific regions, but there are also two regions in the US and two in the European Union.

Yet, although Alibaba’s cloud computing and data intelligence business has already achieved considerable scale, the tech giant still regards itself to be in the nascent stage of the global cloud era. That being said, the company has also benefited from spiking demand amid remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic in China, has bundled its service along with DingTalk, its cloud office collaboration platform.

The demand for China cloud services (excluding Software as a service) grew 70% year-on-year in the second quarter this year to US$4.3 billion, with Ali the dominant player, accounting for 40% of the market, followed by Huawei and Tencent. And despite a COVID-stricken Q1, demand was up 67%.

In an investor presentation, Alibaba highlighted its ability to target industries such as public services, retail, manufacturing, and logistics through DingTalk, which is just one part of a broader stack for Alibaba Cloud.

Additionally, according to Synergy Research, Amazon Web Service has 33% of the global market, Microsoft 18%, and Google 9%. Ali Cloud was placed fourth with a 6% market share.

The market, based on Gartner’s findings, is dominated by five vendors who account for nearly 80% of worldwide IaaS cloud market share. Those include Amazon (47.8%), Microsoft (15.5%), Alibaba (7.7%), Google (4.0%) and IBM (1.8%).

As the cloud market is constantly changing, we will continue looking at AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM in the next year and we will also be keeping an eye on Alibaba Cloud to see what more they bring to the table.

The post Alibaba – is profitability ahead for Asia’s cloud giant? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) represent the business strata facing the most significant financial fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. SMEs in APAC contribute significantly to economic growth, accounting for over 97% of all business and employing more than half the working population in the region.

A similar picture is the case in China, Asia’s largest and most profitable economy. Like most of its neighbors, China’s SMEs have been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis and its subsequent restrictions, which have hampered the local economy, revealing that half of Chinese SMEs do not have the cash flow to last longer than three months.

This was revealed in the Enterprise Survey for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China by the Center for Enterprise Research of Peking University, which also found that 14% percent of the 2,349 SMEs surveyed only had cash flow to last a month at most.

The situation is even direr if one considers that smaller to mid-range businesses account for a staggering 90% of Chinese employment and produce around 80% of its export-ready output, as per the International Food Policy Research Institute. Their February 2020 numbers, when the mainland was in the throes of its pandemic response, show that losing these smaller enterprises could devastate as much as 70% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Recognizing the crippling effect losing these SMEs could have on the local market, Chinese e-commerce titans Alibaba and JD.com appear to have stepped up to provide relief assistance for these smaller players.

After all, Alibaba at least owes its initial breakout success to its prolific B2B marketplace, and the company has always valued its relationship with underdog companies. Back in April, the company had already revealed its 2020 Spring Thunder Initiative, committing to help export-focused SMEs expand into new markets through its e-commerce ecosystem including popular platforms AliExpress, Lazada, and Tmall World.

Besides its online selling platforms, the internet giant is pushing digital transformation efforts for SMEs via its various subsidiaries — it is helping up to 1,000 manufacturing factories to improve the digitization of their supply chains and equipment, is creating 1,000 Alibaba digitized agricultural centers across the country, and its Ant Financial fintech is extending refinancing facilities to cash strapped SMEs, as well as offering contact-free loans via its virtual merchant bank to “tens of millions” of small and micro-businesses.

In addition, its cloud services affiliate Alibaba Cloud is committing hundreds of millions of dollars to assisting partner businesses and hiring more talent.

“We must band together with the SMEs that need the most help, and convert Alibaba’s resources into strength for the SMEs,” Alibaba Group Chairman and CEO, Daniel Zhang said in a staff memo at the time. “We must turn the ‘danger’ brought about by the pandemic into ‘opportunity’ for SMEs to prepare for the future through digital transformation. Now is the time for Alibaba to give back to our community and to give back to our SMEs.”

This is not the first time Alibaba has pitched in to help stricken local SMEs, having collectively assisted 40 million SMEs during the 2008 Asian financial crisis through three major relief initiatives.

Like Alibaba, e-retailer JD.com is aware that it would be a daunting challenge to stabilize and reinvigorate the economy without the backbone of SMEs and micro-businesses. Two months back the sportswear website revealed its Spark economic incentive plan for SMEs, stall operators, and shopkeepers.

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The program is expected to service millions of convenience stores and stalls, providing supply chain and service support for the employment of more than 5 million people. Some of the plan benefits include giving approximately 50 billion quality goods and an RMB100,000 (approx. US$14,370) interest-free credit loan to ensure that supply chain and operational efficiencies of smaller operators are being met.

“JD has both the ability and the responsibility to use digitization to support and make the economy of small stalls and shops more dynamic, helping to further invigorate the overall economy and stabilize employment,” said Lei Xu, CEO of JD Retail.

JD will also assist offline retailers by providing end-to-end support to digitize their businesses as well as providing them easy access to low-cost supplies worth over RMB50 billion (approx. US$7 billion), sourced from nearly 10,000 brand manufacturers and more than 4,000 joint warehouses.

The SME recovery plans from the Chinese e-commerce big boys mirror the smaller-scale efforts to digitize small businesses in Southeast Asia, where only a third (34%) of SMEs had an online presence pre-pandemic.

It is encouraging to observe the more successful online platforms extending support for small businesses, providing digital alternatives to help sustain them as offline channels have suffered immensely in the short term, and appear poised for a long road to recovery.

The post How JD, Alibaba will empower China’s SME recovery appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Amid the tidal shift to remote working and the need to develop apps and systems to help contain the outbreak going forward, the services of China’s cloud giants have been indispensable in the last few months. Leaders Alibaba Cloud and Tencent have been charitable – the former offered has its computational platforms and resources available to tens of research groups to accelerate data-heavy drug development and vaccine discovery – but the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic have reaffirmed the need for cloud computing among customers, and proven hugely lucrative for those cloud leaders. 

The circumstances have also opened up new opportunities. The benefits of the long-emerging telehealth sector have been thrown into the spotlight: Alibaba revealed that its AliHealth app, hosting over 1,000 doctors, has been receiving over 3,000 consultation requests per hour at the peak of the pandemic, while Chinese Tencent’s Wedoctor app had served up to 1.5 million consultation services by the end of February.

Eyes are on automation, too. COVID-19 has provided the watershed moment for investment into automation technology such as robotics to get serious in sectors like manufacturing and logistics. Cloud computing will be a backbone. 

As reported by Reuters, this technological inflection point – though ripe with cloud-driven opportunity – is leading to more fierce competition than ever between China’s tech titans, and contender Tencent is taking every opportunity to steal ground across Asia and beyond from world heavyweight Alibaba Cloud, which dominates its home market and currently ranks fourth worldwide in the public cloud tables, behind AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. 

Tencent last month also announced the launch of a smart city project. The Shenzhen-based ‘smart campus’ will leverage technologies including 5G connectivity, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in a bid to show what’s possible with these initiatives, and will serve as a manifestation of the company’s ambitions.

Sources told the site that Tencent’s began to display a new level of aggressiveness as far back as 2018, when it put cloud at the center of its growth plans, and that energy has only stepped up a gear since the pandemic hit. “The competition with Alibaba is so fierce right now, the sales teams are fighting them for every deal,” an unnamed member of Tencent’s cloud division was quoted.

Already this year, Tencent has appointed more than 3,000 employees to its cloud arm and, as demand soared in China for bandwidth early on in the pandemic, it added a 100,000 cloud servers in eight days to support the box-fresh Tencent Conference. 

In May, the firm said it was gearing up to invest 500 billion yuan  – approximately US$70 billion – in cloud computing, AI and cybersecurity over the next five years. That was a ‘I raise you’ on Alibaba’s pledge to invest 200 billion yuan (US$28 billion) in its own infrastructure just a few weeks’ before. 

Tencent’s stacks, or a portion of them, will be directed at growing its operations outside its home market. At present, Alibaba Cloud has an unchallenged lead, claiming just under half (44.5%) of the entire cloud market share, while Tencent holds about a fifth, the same as Huawei Technologies. The social media and gaming titan wants to take the fight to Alibaba and other US rivals in markets outside of China, in markets where the battle between these two cloud blocs continues. 

The cloud infrastructure markets of India and Indonesia will be crucial turf for Tencent’s growth ambitions, and here it will be able to compete for market share against its own local rival Alibaba Cloud, and US firms Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS. 

Speaking to Reuters, Poshu Yeung, VP of Tencent’s international business group, noted a huge interest in shifting further into the cloud business and for the online education market. 

“Although Tencent came to the space later than Alibaba, I believe the company is willing to endure a relatively long period of investment cycle for this business, hoping to catch up or one day becoming the No. 1 player in this field,” said Alex Liu, tech analyst at China Renaissance commented. 

Part of Tencent’s play to gain ground includes getting better at bespoke B2B sales and products, which is Alibaba Cloud’s bread and butter, while Tencent has been focused more on consumer-centric products and design. 

“Tencent has great genes in business-to-consumer, but in business-to-business, we either didn’t have product managers or we just hired folks with a business-to-consumer background so it took a bit of time to convert their thinking,” a second Tencent cloud source told the publication. 

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Tencent has gained ground in government contracts, a small but reputable sector which it can use to its advantage in attracting private-sector clients. Reuters noted that its determination to win tenders saw Tencent offer the Fujian province government a completed information project plan for 0.01 yuan in 2017.

The post How Tencent is bringing the storm clouds to arch-rival Alibaba appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Some of the side effects of the coronavirus pandemic has been the increase in data usage and storage, along with the consumer-driven uptakes in the likes of video streaming and teleconferencing.

To meet some of this demand in China, Alibaba Group is looking to hire up to 5,000 new people for positions in its cloud computing division. Alibaba Cloud is the third biggest public cloud provider in the world and the biggest in Asia, according to data from the latest Gartner report, with Alibaba’s share in the global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market up to 28.2 percent last year, up two percent from 2018.

The new employment opportunities will be spread around sectors such as networking, databases, servers, and artificial intelligence (AI), Alibaba revealed in a statement.

The announcement follows the recent revelation by the Chinese government that China will be embarking on a nationwide digital transformation plan, with US$1.4 trillion expected to be invested in a variety of digital and urban transformation projects as the mainland looks towards local technology heavyweights including Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent in conscious efforts to wean itself off foreign tech dependence.

Cloud computing and data-driven initiatives from Alibaba will play a major part in this new plan, and the 5,000 new hires will help speed up digital recovery efforts for companies and organizations in China. “The digital transformation journey for businesses in China, which was previously expected to take three to five years, is now likely to be accelerated to be completed within one year,” Alibaba Cloud Intelligence president Jeff Zhang was quoted as saying in the statement.

Unemployment has been on the rise throughout the coronavirus saga, but companies have been shifting focus to meet the changes in customer demand, and large tech firms are still looking to fill talent gaps for many of their newer or demanding enterprises.

Google Cloud apparently has hundreds of job openings in cloud-related services, and likewise for Microsoft, with advertisements for hundreds of job postings at its Azure cloud operations.

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Alibaba Cloud’s jobs announcement comes a couple of months after it committed to invest 200 billion yuan (US$28 billion) into its cloud infrastructure over the next three years. Alibaba Cloud Intelligence president Zhang said at the time, “The pandemic has posed additional stress on the overall economy across sectors, but it also steers us to put more focus on the digital economy.”

The post Alibaba Cloud to hire 5000 workers as COVID-19 drives IaaS demand appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Way back in 1999, when China was emerging as a prolific production and manufacturing resource center, Alibaba was founded as an innovative online B2B platform for Chinese businesses looking to connect and sell their goods to other enterprises globally.

This proved to be a winning formula, with Alibaba providing the ideal platform at the time to connect Chinese businesses with foreign companies for commerce, just as websites like eBay had launched a nascent C2C platform in the US earlier in the decade.

Shaped by another coronavirus

What started in founder Jack Ma’s small Hangzhou apartment with a team of 18 grew to 400 by 2002. Alibaba was beginning to turn a profit and was now preparing to launch its first C2C platforml, Taobao.

Then later that year, a novel coronavirus that came to be known as SARS broke out in the country, and for the first time in the internet age, China was forced to deal with a large scale shutdown of its manufacturing sector. Workers and shoppers stayed home in droves, causing retail sales to plummet.

Alibaba’s planned launch of Taobao was in jeopardy when in mid-2003, the company was forced to quarantine its entire workforce after an Alibaba employee contracted the SARS virus. At a time before tech advancements allowed for easier remote working experiences, Alibaba staff took their desktop computers home to keep Alibaba’s B2B platform up and running.

Meanwhile, Ma and a core team returned to Ma’s apartment to complete the development of the consumer-oriented Taobao site, and this proved to be a telling moment in the company’s history.

The self-imposed quarantine restrictions were causing Chinese consumers to turn to the internet to procure items for the first time, launching the wider acceptance of e-commerce in the mainland a year after eBay had entered the Chinese market.

Taobao was launched on May 10 2003, competing with eBay by enticing users with a new promotional model: sell their goods on Taobao and the company would not take any commission or seller fees from sales for three years. By 2006, Taobao had overtaken eBay as the dominant C2C platform in the country, and that shift in SARS-related consumer attitudes helped turn Alibaba into the e-commerce juggernaut it is today, with over US$56 billion in yearly revenue and over 600 million users on the Taobao platform alone.

Alibaba: Giving back as a company

There are numerous parallels between the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003 and the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak of 2020: both diseases originated in China, and both caused consumers to change expectations towards online shopping to fill a physical retail gap.

Since that earlier outbreak, Chinese tech giants have matured in scale, and in social responsibility. When reports of COVID-19 became known, Alibaba was one of the first private companies to contribute towards China’s research ad relief efforts.

Alibaba Cloud, the company’s cloud division, lent its AI and cloud computing capabilities in the field of genome research to the government, helping study methods to prevent the spread of the disease and to expedite development of a vaccine.

And despite declines in revenue of its core businesses, Alibaba has funded efforts (via the Alibaba Foundation and the Jack Ma Foundation) to cooperate with other countries and medical professionals to provide up-to-date information and guidelines on COVID-19 findings from China’s top medical experts, on the free medical resource platform Global MediXchange for Combating COVID-19 (GMCC).

In addition, the e-commerce giant has helped to alleviate the burden on overworked health workers with its AliHealth app. Hosted by more than 1,000 medical professionals, the app was receiving upwards of 3,000 consultation requests per hour during the height of China’s pandemic response.

With numerous enterprises impacted by the virus, Alibaba Cloud further revealed its Global SME Enablement Program to assist small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with over US$30 million in tech relief in the form of cloud-native solutions. Alibaba’s financial affiliate, Ant Financial’s MYBank unit is offering 20 billion yuan (US$2.9 billion) in loans to companies in China to help keep them economically solvent.

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Alibaba is demonstrating what the organization has learned, and the company’s values that were built following the trials of the SARS ’03 outbreak. As former chairman, Jack Ma said during the launch of the GMCC, “We can’t beat this [latest] virus unless we share our resources, know-how and hard-earned lessons.”

The post SARS helped Alibaba become a $470B titan – now it’s giving back appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Built in partnership with the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University – and backed by the Chinese tech titan’s Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Alibaba Health arms – the GMCC’s mission is to facilitate “communication and collaboration across borders,” as well as providing the necessary tech firepower and data intelligence to drive research efforts around the world.

Chinese business magnate, investor and politician, Jack Ma. source: Shutterstock

The platform can provide medical teams “on the front line” with the necessary communication channels to share practical experience and information about fighting the pandemic.

Sharing our experiences will be key to winning the “inevitable battle” against COVID-19, it asserts.

The resource – assembled rapidly over the past 2 months and available for free, hosted on Alibaba Cloud – comprises comprehensive guidelines and best practice for medical professionals around the world coping with COVID-19 from China’s top experts.

Friends,

Hospitals in outbreak countries will face huge challenges coping with the surge of patients. The clinical practitioners on the front lines of China’s fight against COVID-19 have developed a handbook of treatment and care protocols for healthcare providers. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/TUCyvah7Su

— Jack Ma (@JackMa) March 18, 2020

It also details how organizations can minimize the cost and maximize the effect of measures to control the outbreak, and makes the case for hospital “command centers” when encountering large-scale emergencies.

In a foreword that thanks initiation from the Jack Ma foundation and the technical support of AliHealth, Chairman of The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Professor Tingbo Liang, said: “Faced with an unknown virus, sharing and collaboration are the best remedy.

“The publication of this Handbook is one of the best ways to mark the courage and wisdom our healthcare workers have demonstrated over the past two months.”

The guide is currently available in Chinese, English, Italian, Korean and Japanese.

Alibaba attacks with technology

Alibaba itself has not recoiled from the blow caused by the virus, since its emergence in the titan’s own backyard. The firm has been relentlessly pursuing how both its existing tech arsenal and newly-developed solutions can help tackle COVID-19, by supporting medical research and alleviating overrun healthcare facilities.

The spread of the coronavirus is highlighting the case for the further development of virtual healthcare or ‘telemedicine’ in the months to come, with the communication channel helping to reduce hospital traffic while minimizing the transmission risk to other individuals and health workers.

Alibaba revealed that its AliHealth app, hosting over 1,000 doctors, has been receiving over 3,000 consultation requests per hour. Chinese tech rival Tencent said its Wedoctor app had served up to 1.5 million consultation services by the end of February.

Over the past months, Alibaba Cloud – the third biggest cloud company globally – has made its computational platforms and resources available to 20 research groups so far, to accelerate data-heavy drug development and vaccine discovery, as well as supporting public health development efforts. That’s already led to groundbreaking results;

• The intelligent CT diagnostic system on COVID-19 pneumonia developed by Tsinghua University is able to complete diagnose of the suspected case in 10 seconds

• The bioinformatic dataset transfer rate is speeded up by 5 times, and the performance of gene assembly is accelerated by 25 percent for Sun Yat-sen University

• Jingtai technology has speeded up the drug virtual screening time from more than one month to one week

HOW GIANTS ALIBABA AND BAIDU ARE FIGHTING CHINA’S CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK

Tech Wire Asia | 31 January, 2020

Alibaba Cloud is also helping researchers and governments predict the nature of the spread of the outbreak – such as epidemic size, peak time, lasting days, and even active infected, in a particular region – with purpose-built programs taking primary data and returning a report with a claimed 98 percent accuracy. All this can take into account different public healthcare policies and social status.

The post Jack Ma is bringing the ‘fight’ to the global COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.