Alibaba Cloud Showcases Leading AI Initiatives at Apsara Conference
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, showcased an array of industry-specific AI models at its annual flagship tech event Apsara Conference. These advancements are built upon Tongyi Qianwen, the company’s proprietary foundation model, and are designed to streamline business operations and enhance user experiences.
Additionally, the cloud pioneer unveiled a multitude of AI innovations, including a digital avatar creation tool and AI text-to-image tools. These advancements aim to simplify the process of digital content creation for businesses across sectors.
Here's an overview of the prominent AI innovations presented by Alibaba Cloud during the Apsara Conference:
- Character Creation & AI Chat Model (Tongyi Xingchen): This model facilitates engaging, human-like interactions with virtual characters. It enables users to create their own characters and interact with them for personality-driven companionship, emotional support, and entertainment.
- Reading AI Model (Tongyi ZoneWit): This AI model comprehends documents and share knowledge easily, helping users boost their work efficiency. Users can upload documents in various formats and the assistant will summarize, extract information, and answer related questions in either Chinese or English.
- Customer Service AI Model (Tongyi Xiaomi): A vertical model designed for customer service scenarios. With improved capabilities in natural language understanding, analytics, and inference, the model comprehends customer intentions and delivers appropriate responses accordingly. Several large banking and insurance enterprises have already integrated this model to enhance their customer support systems.
- Programming AI Model (Tongyi Lingma): This model aids developers in code generation, code explanation and code search. It can auto-complete codes, recommend changes and convert codes written in one programming language to another. This tool facilitates code development in a cost-effective and efficient way.
- Healthcare AI Model (Tongyi Renxin): Equipped with comprehensive medical knowledge, this model serves as an intelligent healthcare assistant offering personalized health advice. It can comprehend medical reports, identify health issues through user interactions, and provide advice accordingly.
- Legal AI Model (Tongyi Farui): Designed to help legal professionals increase their work productivity, this model can perform various tasks including legal research, answering law-related inquiries, providing analysis on litigation cases, and drafting legal documents.
- Finance AI Model (Tongyi Dianjin): Pre-trained with a variety of financial information, this model can answer finance-related questions, extract key points from financial reports and analyses, and generate draft financial reports and charts, simplifying finance-related tasks for users. The model can manage complex and multiple queries through the cooperation of its LLM agents.
- Virtual Character Generation Tool: Built upon Tongyi Wanxiang, Alibaba Cloud’s foundation model for AI image generation, this AI tool makes creating virtual character much easier. For example, merchants can create a virtual character in certain styles based on text or image prompts, and then generate product photographs with the virtual characters for product promotions.
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The virtual character generation tool helps e-commerce merchants create product images |
9. Sketch-to-Stylist Picture Tool: This tool transforms rough sketches into colored images in a variety of styles, including oil painting, watercolor painting, and anime art, making art creation easier and encouraging creative innovation.
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| Users can turn sketches into colored images with Tongyi Wanxiang |
10. Digital Avatar Creation Tool: This tool simplifies the process of digital avatar creation. By extracting facial features from a three-minute video of an individual, it creates an animated avatar through 3D modeling. This tool aids businesses in creating unique digital avatars, which can be used to enhance customer engagement on e-commerce platforms.
Alibaba Cloud Launches Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Industry-specific Models
Alibaba Cloud launches Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Industry-specific Models to Support Customers Reap Benefits of Generative AI. The New AI Model Building Platform and a suite of innovative cloud products launched to cater for the surging demand among customers and developers
Alibaba Cloud Unveils New Services to Solve Generative AI Development Issues for Global Customer
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced a series of innovative AI products and services at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Global Summit. The comprehensive set of new products are designed to meet the burgeoning demand for Generative AI development from customers worldwide.
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| Selina Yuan, President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, speaks at the Alibaba Cloud Global Summit |
The extensive AI solutions from Alibaba Cloud, spanning from AI computing platforms to AI acceleration services and AI-centric applications, are designed to assist customers in creating their own Generative AI applications in a more efficient, security-focused, and cost-effective manner.
Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said: "To cater for the thriving demand for generative AI, we are constantly introducing innovative products and services to tackle different pain points of our global customers. Our comprehensive AI services are designed to help customers seize the unparalleled opportunities offered by this unstoppable technology trend.”
"As part of our commitment to foster more inclusive and innovative application development for generative AI, we have been joining forces with industry leaders to further extend our capabilities for different scenarios, ” added Yuan.
Comprehensive AI Services for Generative AI Development
- To reduce AI process complexity, Alibaba Cloud introduced PAI-Lingjun Intelligent Computing Service, a comprehensive AI computing platform for high-performance computing tasks, such as foundation model training and inference. It offers large-scale deep learning and intelligent computing capabilities on Alibaba Cloud. The service also provides full-process AI engineering capabilities, including AI development, AI training, AI role management, and computing resource management. The platform, already in use in Mainland China, will be available in Singapore from early 2024, followed by more general availability across Asia throughout the year.
- To accelerate AI model training and inference, Alibaba Cloud launched Alibaba Cloud AI Acceleration Solution, which uses leading datasets and hardware accelerators to manage data-intensive applications, optimizing the utilization of computing instances to expedite AI model training and inference tasks. According to the Stanford DAWN Deep Learning Benchmark, it can speed up AI model training by 70% and inference by up to three times. The solution includes layers for cloud-native AI suite, AI job scheduling, AI data acceleration, AI computing acceleration engine, resource scheduling, and computing resources, with each layer offering specific acceleration solutions for different scenarios.
- To simplify building AI-based search service, Alibaba Cloud unveiled OpenSearch LLM-Based Conversational Search, its proprietary large-scale distributed search engine that enables intelligent search services in e-commerce, multimedia, social media, and big data queries in enterprises. Empowered by large language models, the service allows enterprises to rapidly build a dedicated conversational search system, ensuring security, accuracy, and reliability in search results. It also supports multimodal search results such as answers, URLs, and images to cater to specific business search requirements.
Technology Partnership to Foster Innovative Application Development
Alibaba Cloud announced a series of partnerships with global technology leaders to offer customers more advanced and security-focused cloud services, accelerating their digital transformation journey:
To promote innovative application development for enterprises, Alibaba Cloud collaborates with Red Hat to make Red Hat OpenShift, a platform for building, deploying and managing applications at scale, deployable on Alibaba Cloud. Red Hat OpenShift on Alibaba Cloud combines the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes with Alibaba Cloud's robust hybrid infrastructure. Optimized with full-stack automated operations, it offers a more consistent experience across environments to help customers boost productivity more effectively.
Accelerate Digital Transformation for Global Customers
Alibaba Cloud also announced collaborations with enterprise customers in markets including Malaysia, South Korea, United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates, underscoring its unwavering commitment to its over 4 million global customers in exploring new opportunities presented by digital transformation and new AI trends.
First Asian Games Core Systems to be Hosted on Alibaba Cloud
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| Alibaba Cloud's technologies support the first "Asian Games on the Cloud” |
In a mission to accelerate the digitalization of the Asian Games, the Hangzhou Asian Games Organizing Committee (HAGOC) has launched its core systems on Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. Alibaba Cloud’s robust, reliable and secure technologies will support the first “Asian Games on the Cloud”, to facilitate more intelligent, sustainable, sophisticated and efficient Asian Games - to be held in Hangzhou, the company’s headquarters, from September 23 to October 8.
The core systems, comprising Games Management Systems (GMS), Results Distribution Systems (RDS) and Games Support Systems (GSS), will support around-the-clock operations of 56 competition venues and other critical facilities such as the information technology management center, main media center and the Hangzhou Asian Games Villages, serving more than 100,000 registered users, including the athletes, broadcasters, journalists, staff and volunteers from 45 countries and regions across the globe.
As the Games’ official information technology integrator and cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud is responsible for running an all-on-cloud Asian Games, leveraging its proven track record in supporting large-scale worldwide sports events.
Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, said: “We have extensive experience supporting large-scale global sports events building upon our proven cloud technologies and trusted services. We are proud and excited to return to our headquarters this year to help deliver an innovative, efficient, sustainable and inclusive Asian Games in Hangzhou. With the even more advanced core systems support, we are committed to an effective collaboration with the Games’ stakeholders, and with further improved cloud broadcast technologies, we will bring more engaging viewing experience to the global audience and sport fans.”
“The Hangzhou Asian Games will be another milestone for Alibaba Cloud to show how robust, scalable and secure cloud computing technologies can help drive digital transformation of large-scale sports events to bring sports and entertainment to every corner of the world,” Yuan added.
State-of-the art architecture seamlessly integrates with cloud-native core systems
Alibaba Cloud provides the fundamental architecture that supports the seamless integration of the core systems as well as intelligent applications such as cloud broadcasting and event organization and communications.
For example, at the end of each competition the Results Distribution System will receive data from the timing and scoring system at the venue, which will be further integrated into the central system for distribution in different formats through different application programming interfaces (APIs), such as the results display and news feeds. All of these are built on the Alibaba Cloud to ensure efficient, accurate and stable results distributions.
Using cloud-native technology and running it on Alibaba Cloud’s container services, the company enables more agile, scalable and efficient operations of the event. In addition, there is no longer a need for physical data centers that require large dedicated space and maintenance facilities to run. Cloud resources will be released once the event is concluded, making the games more environmentally friendly.
More than 5,000 hours of excitement transmitted through live cloud broadcasting
The Hangzhou Asian Games will also be the first in the games’ history during which Rights-Holding Broadcasters (RHBs) will receive live footage through public cloud infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud expects to transmit more than 5,000 hours of live footage through as many as 68 high-definition (HD) and ultra-high-definition (UHD) feeds during the event. In addition to live broadcast, the cloud-based content platform delivers footage in HD or UHD, highlights of the Games and news flashes for RHBs to present to the audience’s mobile or other devices.
During the Games, the cloud broadcasting will transcend physical boundaries and bring the excitement to audiences across Asia and the rest of the world, through Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure and services in Hangzhou to ApsaraVideo Live Centers in Shanghai and Beijing as well as regional cloud resources in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) and Singapore.
Prior to cloud broadcasting, broadcasters had to rely on dedicated and more costly international telecommunication optical circuits and spend a considerable amount of time to set up the equipment, in order to send live footage halfway across the globe back to their home countries. Now leveraging the highly scalable, resilient and secure global infrastructure of Alibaba Cloud and its network acceleration service – Global Accelerator, live multilateral content in high quality over the public cloud with a fraction of the cost and minimum time for set-up can be delivered.
Cloud technology helps bring smart Asian Games Villages
The Hangzhou Asian Games has launched an Intelligent Operation Platform to manage the operation of the three Asian Games Villages, which is expected to host over 20,000 athletes, reporters and officials. The platform leverages Alibaba Cloud’s advanced visualization tool to analyze real-time intelligence to further streamline the management system, while providing more seamless user experience for those who live in the Villages.
For example, Alibaba Cloud’s solution utilizes real-time information to analyze traffic and crowd management. A warning will be provided on a dashboard if a public area gets too crowded for public safety. Extreme weather, power failure and fire warnings are also available for organizer’s intelligence-driven decisions.
With Alibaba Cloud’s natural language processing (NLP) technology, an intelligent service robot will also provide all-day online consulting services in both English and Chinese for people living in the Asian Games Villages through a web application service. The chatbot can provide real-time responses related to the services available in the Villages.
Alibaba Cloud Named a Challenger in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud AI Developer Services for Second Consecutive Year
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a Challenger in this year’s Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud AI Developer Services (CAIDS) for the second consecutive year. In the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Cloud AI Developer Services report, released at the same time, Alibaba Cloud amongst other recognized vendors were evaluated basis many inclusion criteria such as “Nature Language Generation / Text to Speech”, “Translation”, and “Image Generation”.
Gartner defines cloud AI developer services (CAIDS) as cloud-hosted or containerized services that enable software developers who are not data science experts to use artificial intelligence (AI) models via APIs, software development kits (SDKs) or applications. Core capabilities include automated machine learning (autoML), automated data preparation, feature engineering, automated model building and model management. Optional and important complementary capabilities include language and vision services such as sentiment analysis and image generation.
Alibaba Cloud’s AI offerings to help enterprises and developers unleash productivity
Alibaba Cloud offers a highly customizable offering that makes advanced AI applications accessible. Its open-source ModelScope platform provides AI models that cover a wide range of fields, including computer vision, natural language processing and audio processing. These ready-to-deploy models are pre-trained to excel at specific tasks such as text-to-image generation. As an open-source community, ModelScope aims to make developing and running AI models easier and more cost-effective, enabling universities and smaller companies to easily use AI for their research and in their business respectively. Since the launch in 2022, with over 2 million active users, ModelScope has made 1000 models available with over 36 million model downloads to date.
Further in this area, Alibaba Cloud recently announced that it open-sourced its 7-billion-parameter Large Language Models (LLM), Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, through its AI model community ModelScope, and the collaborative AI platform Hugging Face. The models’ code, model weights, and documentation will be freely accessible to academics, researchers, and commercial companies worldwide.
In July, Alibaba Cloud recently unveiled ModelScopeGPT, a powerful framework designed to use the platform’s Large Language Models (LLM) to connect an extensive array of domain-specific expert models on ModelScope, enabling users to complete complex tasks such as the creation of multilingual videos.
Alibaba Cloud launched its LLM named Tongyi Qianwen in April, a model that enables developers to create customized AI features in a cost-effective way. The company recently launched Tongyi Wanxiang, a cutting-edge AI image generation model capable of using text prompts in English and Chinese to create detailed images in various styles.
Alibaba Cloud has also created a Machine Learning Platform for AI (PAI), providing high performance and easy-to-scale capabilities for use in various industry scenarios as well as tools to develop specific AI models. The platform provides over 140 built-in optimization algorithms for enterprises and developers.
Disclaimer
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services, Jim Scheibmeir, Svetlana Sicular, Arun Batchu, Mike Fang, Van Baker, Frank O'Connor, 22 May 2023
Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Cloud AI Developer Services, Arun Batchu, Van Baker, Svetlana Sicular, Mike Fang, Frank O'Connor, Jim Scheibmeir, 22 May 2023
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Alibaba Cloud’s Energy Expert Helps Analyze Carbon Footprint for The First Olympic Esports Week
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, today announced that its AI-driven sustainability solution - Energy Expert - has been trialed to measure and analyze carbon emissions from temporary construction built to host the first Olympic Esports Week, generating data-driven insights on the choice of materials and equipment. The tool has been deployed through Alibaba Cloud’s partnership with the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
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| Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash |
Alibaba Cloud deployed its proven carbon measurement tool, Energy Expert, to measure and analyze the carbon emissions of the event’s temporary construction. A series of metrics including the impact of energy consumption, waste management, signage and decoration were assessed. This software-as-a-service tool was used by the Local Organizing Committee to compare the relative impacts of several types of materials and equipment.
Leveraging the latest tech-driven sustainability solution, Energy Expert allows event organizers to identify the sources of the carbon emissions from venue construction and operation, quantify the carbon footprint generated by a venue and visualize a venue’s sustainability performance via an integrated dashboard and online reports.
According to Alibaba Cloud’s Energy Expert, the carbon footprint of temporary construction for the Olympic Esports Week 2023 is estimated at 274 tons CO2e, after replacing 60% of printed signage with digital alternatives which led to 14 tons CO2e of carbon dioxide emissions reductions, as well as reusing 50% of carpets after the event that would slash emissions further by 10 tons CO2e.
“We are always looking for ways to reduce our impact on the environment, and we’re pleased to work with Alibaba Cloud to apply cutting-edge technologies to measure carbon emissions so we can continue to make a difference,” said Vincent Pereira, Head of Virtual Sport of IOC Sports Department.
“We have been supporting the IOC’s digital transformation of the Olympics since Tokyo 2020, and it has been an honour to be part of this latest, historic milestone for virtual sport. Sustainability is one of the priorities for our sports innovation roadmap. As the sports industry continues to evolve, we’re passionate about providing organizations with timely data, actionable insights and energy-saving recommendations that make positive and tangible impacts,” said Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
The first Olympic Esports Week marks the latest step in the collaboration between the IOC and Alibaba on digital transformation – following the success of developing sports innovations for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022 – and is Alibaba’s first large-scale international project to tackle carbon emissions within the esports industry.
The esports industry has a growing environmental impact as the sport becomes more mainstream. Industry analysis estimates that in 2022 a single esports team could create as much as 100 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Individual consumption is also growing as 40% of the global population (three billion people) now play video games, according to industry analyst firm DFC Intelligence, meaning that there’s a significant impact to be addressed.
Besides the carbon measurement of temporary construction, to draw public attention on the importance of reducing carbon footprints, Alibaba Cloud’s web application for Olympic Esports Week, invites the public to take photos of items around them (such as keyboards and headsets) to help understand the carbon footprint of each item and actions that can be taken to reduce this footprint, such as increasing the lifetime of digital equipment or buying second hand equipment. This is achieved through integrating Alibaba Cloud’s AI technologies with traditional emission datasets. Participants can also pledge to take carbon reduction actions in their daily life, such as bringing their e-waste to dedicated collection points for recycling. Participants agreeing to the pledge can earn points on the app, with an aim to earn a Sustainability Champion badge, as part of the web application.
The inaugural Olympic Esports Week, taking place at Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre, features the best of virtual sports, including esports competitions, exhibition matches, exhibitions of the latest innovations, as well as a series of panel discussions and education sessions organized by IOC. The festival also played host to the Olympic Esports Series finals, which was the culmination of this year's Olympic Esports Series which saw top Olympic Esports athletes from around the world competing in ten disciplines for a gold medal.
As a global leading cloud infrastructure provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to helping organizations slash carbon emissions with emerging technologies such as intelligence computing and AI technologies. Leading the forefront of this notion, Alibaba Cloud strives to achieve Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon neutrality and commits to powering its cloud computing with 100% clean energy by 2030.
Alibaba Cloud Integrates Tongyi Qianwen into AI Assistant to Enhance Productivity
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced today that its large language model (LLM), Tongyi Qianwen, has been integrated into its intelligent assistant named Tingwu. The assistant excels at converting speech and videos to text in real-time, aiming to enhance both personal and workplace productivity.
The recently launched LLM enables Tingwu to comprehend and analyze multimedia content with high levels of accuracy and efficiency, such as generating summary text from video and audio files, capturing key talking points for each speaker, and creating a timeline of multimedia files with a summary of each section.
The LLM-powered Tingwu, called “Tongyi Tingwu”, is now available for public beta testing. Tongyi Tingwu will also be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba's digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, supporting users’ AI demands at work. In addition to improving workplace efficiency, Tongyi Tingwu can also be used across various multimedia platforms, responding to the growing needs for faster and easier knowledge sharing in online education, training, interviews, live streaming, podcasts, and short-form videos.
"We live at a time when a growing amount of video and audio content is being consumed in various formats every day. In line with this, Tongyi Tingwu aims to use the large language model to facilitate faster and better comprehension and easier sharing of multimedia content," said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. "As we gradually integrate the Tongyi Qianwen model into our products and services, we hope users can reap the benefits from these compelling AI innovations for their work, study, play and interaction with each other.”
By leveraging proprietary audio and video models developed by Alibaba’s research institute DAMO - including the self-developed speech recognition model Paraformer and speaker verification model CAM++, along with the newly-released LLM Tongyi Qianwen - Tingwu can transcribe video and audio files with higher accuracy while enabling numerous AI-powered features. Additional AI features offered by Tongyi Tingwu will be available later this year. These features include automatically compiling text answers to address user queries across audio/video files, generating a summary based on PowerPoint slides extracted from videos, and providing real-time translation between English and Chinese for multimedia content with Tingwu as a Chrome plugin.
General public can access the upgraded AI-powered assistant online (tingwu.aliyun.com) starting from today to experience its capabilities through their Alibaba Cloud accounts and receive free transcription services as part of an open trial.
Alibaba Cloud unveiled Tongyi Qianwen on April 11, which is scheduled to be integrated across Alibaba's various businesses to improve the user experience in the near future. The company's customers and developers will have access to the model to create customized AI features in a cost-effective manner, too.
The cloud pioneer also launched the "Tongyi Qianwen Partnership Program," aiming to co-create large language models tailored for different industries with partners across sectors, including petrochemicals, electricity, transportation, hospitality, enterprise services, telecommunications and finance.
Alibaba Cloud Unveils Plans to Strengthen Global Partnership Ecosystem
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| Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence at Alibaba, delivered a keynote speech at Alibaba Cloud Partner Summit 2023 |
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is set to further empower its ecosystem partners through a series of new initiatives, including the launch of an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Acceleration Program, a training empowerment program for partners, as well as new incentives to reward partner excellency.
“We are committed to growing together with our global partners and providing them with even stronger support to expand their businesses into Southeast Asia and beyond,” said Edward Cai, Chief Commercial Officer, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence at the company's Partner Summit 2023 in Singapore. “All new initiatives underscore how much value we place on our partners. Together with our partners’ industry know-how, technology capabilities and market insights, we can deliver significant benefits to our customers.”
New Initiatives to Support Partners’ Growth
Alibaba Cloud’s ISV Acceleration Program was launched to provide global ISVs with new financial incentives and more robust technical support to expand their business opportunities in Southeast Asia. As part of the program, the cloud leader will help its ISV partners to optimize the marketplace listing fee on Alibaba Cloud’s marketplace platform, and expand the product sales through Alibaba Cloud’s sales team and its vast network of channel partners.
Alibaba Cloud also pledges to enhance technical support for global ISV partners, offering comprehensive technical enablement resources to help them build, publish and operate their solutions on the cloud platform. In addition, the company will invest to co-develop customized products and solutions with its ISV partners, in order to meet the diverse digital transformation demands from customers across Southeast Asia.
ISV partners including Neo4J (graph database provider), 6Estates (AI fintech platform), One2Cloud Pte Ltd (multi-cloud solution and blockchain services provider) and SCash Global Pte Ltd (technology innovation SaaS company) have already joined the acceleration program to get the most benefits from their partnership with Alibaba Cloud.
At the same summit, the APAC cloud leader also announced the launch of a new training empowerment portal for global partners. The Alibaba Cloud Partner Empowerment Portal provides product and service trainings and certifications, educational content on topical technology developments, as well as resources and tools to increase partners’ service capabilities. The portal aims to empower 500 global partners including channel partners, Managed Service Partners (MSPs) and ISVs in the current financial year, with training topics covering cloud, AI, Web3 and more.
To bring more tangible benefits to Alibaba Cloud’s partners outside China, the company also announced a series of new financial incentives including discounts and rebates for rewarding resellers and distributors as well as some joint go-to-market initiatives. This is part of the USD1 billion investment that Alibaba Cloud announced in 2022 in order to support its global partners’ technology innovation and their market expansion.
“Our new initiatives showcase our unwavering commitment to helping our global partners thrive and innovate on Alibaba Cloud,” said Selina Yuan, President of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “Partners play an essential role in enhancing and delivering Alibaba Cloud’s services and offering to our global customers. Together with partners, we can bring world-class technologies, products and solutions to our customers for their greater business success.”
New Partnership on Security, Blockchain and Talent Development
During the summit, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled deeper collaboration with its ecosystem partners. The cloud leader has announced its new collaboration with IBM to provide a best-in-class security solution for businesses across APAC.
The security solution integrates features of IBM’s security products - QRadar SIEM and QRadar SOAR - as well as Alibaba Cloud’s wide range of security capabilities. It provides services including real-time reporting and centralized visibility into the cloud environment to detect threats such as ransomware, insider threats and cloud attacks. The co-developed solution aims to mitigate mounting cybersecurity risks while creating a secure, stable and protected cloud environment for clients during their digital transformation journey.
Another collaboration unveiled is with Avalanche, a leading blockchain platform, providing a launchpad for businesses to rapidly deploy metaverses on the Avalanche public blockchain. Cloudverse is a one-stop solution for businesses to seamlessly customize, launch and maintain their own metaverse space, creating new dimensions for engaging with customers.
Alibaba Cloud also announced collaboration with training partners to bolster talent development in Southeast Asia. With the target to train 100,000 general public talents in the region by the current financial year, the SEA Talent Empowerment Program aims to attract training partners to contribute to the talent development drive. The initial training partners include Rahi Systems (information technology services and solutions provider), Solutions for Asia (security service solution provider), Lightning Cloud (multi-cloud operation solution platform) and Edu360 Cloud (digital certification service platform).
The leading cloud service provider recognized a wide range of partners for their collaboration and innovation in contributing to customers’ success over the past year. The Asia Partner of the Year honors eight partners including IBM, AI Rudder (from Singapore), LGMS Berhad (from Malaysia), PT Sigma Cipta Caraka (from Indonesia), and Digital One (from Hong Kong).
Alibaba Cloud currently works with about 12,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM and Neo4j.
Alibaba Cloud Unveils New AI Model to Support Enterprises’ Intelligence Transformation
Alibaba Cloud has launched Tongyi Qianwen to improve user experience and provide personalized AI features. Furthermore, it has also announced lower-cost options for its cloud products in order to make computing more accessible and inexpensive for businesses eager to capitalize on new prospects in this new age of AI and cloud era
TÜV Rheinland certifies carbon emissions for Alibaba Cloud’s customers
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| Andreas Höfer, TÜV Rheinland (left), and Raymond Ma, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence (right), signing the Memorandum of Understanding |
TÜV Rheinland and Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, have launched a new initiative to support Alibaba Cloud‘s customers in achieving their sustainability goals. Both companies have now signed a memorandum of understanding to this effect. As a result, companies that use Alibaba Cloud’s “Energy Expert” service will be able to have their carbon emissions verified and certified by TÜV Rheinland experts in the future. For the certification, experts from TÜV Rheinland will verify the actual carbon emissions from a company’s daily business activities – from procurement and supply chain management to the manufacture and distribution of products. The new offering is scheduled to launch in March 2023.
Energy Expert is a solution from Alibaba Cloud that helps companies manage their carbon emissions and other sustainability indicators. The Energy Expert solution uses Big Data computing and AI technologies to do so. Since its launch last year, Energy Expert has helped more than 2,300 companies achieve energy savings of more than 2 million kilowatt hours per day calculated and stated by the Alibaba Cloud.
“We want to provide opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses in particular to achieve their sustainability goals in a cost-effective manner. Through our certification, Alibaba Cloud’s customers can transparently and credibly demonstrate the progress they have already made in terms of their carbon emissions and how they plan to further reduce their energy consumption and emissions,” explains Frank Dorssers, responsible for the customized certification standards business at TÜV Rheinland.
“We hope to develop comprehensive energy saving solutions together with our global partners. This will enable our customers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, to achieve their net-zero goals in a cost-effective and time-saving manner and through a sound sustainability strategy,” said Raymond Ma, General Manager of Europe, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “We are pleased to work with experienced industry partners such as TÜV Rheinland, and we look forward to expanding our global partnership ecosystem and bringing more advanced technologies and digital solutions to our customers in the near future.”
Alibaba Cloud Named a Leader in Cloud Database Management Systems for the Third Consecutive Year
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS) for the third consecutive year in 2022, as well as a Challenger in its Magic Quadrant™ for Network Firewalls for the second consecutive year.
Alibaba Cloud Named a Visionary in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services for Second Consecutive Year
Alibaba Cloud has been named a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services for the second consecutive year. This award recognizes the company's ability to execute and its comprehensive vision in the cloud computing market, where it provides a comprehensive and secure cloud platform to businesses of all sizes.
PLDT Global Enterprise Receives Award from Alibaba Cloud for Esport Project
PLDT Global Enterprise, through its Asia Pacific team, recently received “Project of the Year Award” from Alibaba Cloud - the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group – further fortifying its partnership with the latter.















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