Alibaba Cloud unveils new products, calls India important market

Alibaba Cloud, the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, unveiled over 10 new products and features at the Alibaba Cloud APAC Summit here on Thursday. The company also emphasised that India was an important market with strong potential.

The new products and features will be available for the first time outside China and will be accessible to the clients worldwide. The products include Alibaba Log Service (SLS), Support of "Bring Your Own Key" (BYOK), SaaS Accelerator, Smart Access Gateway (SAG) Software, Container Registry (ACR) Enterprise Edition and Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK).

Speaking on the occasion, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President Selina Yuan said: "Alibaba Cloud has been paving the way for a digital era across Asia-Pacific by building a world class cloud infrastructure. It is our mission to build an inclusive cloud service that will drive a highly integrated technology ecosystem. We are confident of helping local businesses of all sizes to grow in the region."

Asia-Pacific's top IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) provider as per Gartner Research's 2019 report, Alibaba Cloud also launched the "China Gateway Programme" at the summit along with eight regional partners. The signing ceremony was attended by Chee Hing Tat, Senior Minister of State for Trade, Industry and Education, Singapore.

The programme aims to assist companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), looking to set up and expand their businesses in China. Through the local partners in Singapore and around the region, Alibaba cloud will provide firms of varied sizes with a programme on doing business in China by connecting them with Chinese companies and consumers via the Alibaba ecosystem.

"China Gateway is special programme to help enterprises expand their business in China. We would like to make the process of doing business easier. Alibaba Cloud not only provides infrastructure that underpins the entire Alibaba economy, it also ensures inclusiveness so that our cloud technologies can be accessed by companies of all sizes," Yuan said.

On how soon the company will propose the China Gateway Programme to the Indian SMEs market, Yuan said: "Today the programme was launched and I can tell you that we are ready for India. It's a global programme and we already have 700 SMEs which will benefit from it."

On the current state of cloud business in India, Yuan said: "India is one of our very important markets. That's why we already have our data centres in the country. We have a dedicated local office and team there to work with our India partners. We already have Paytm as our customer and we also have other local clients. We think the Indian market is very good with strong technological background. We think we can do more together."

Elaborating on the company's plans for India, Henry Zhang, Chief Product Officer at Alibaba Cloud, said: "Indian customers are very much on the cutting edge. Some of the largest growing startups such as Paytm and Big Basket are in India. We are focused on building products and services that will benefit Indian customers."

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud provides a suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, startups, corporations and public services.