Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group, was named a leader in Omdia’s Market Radar: Global Enterprise-Level MaaS Market Analysis, 2025. The report reviewed providers offering Model as a Service (MaaS) platforms for enterprise use.
MaaS refers to cloud services that allow companies to access and use artificial intelligence (AI) models through application programming interfaces, tools, or integrated platforms. Alibaba Cloud introduced the MaaS concept in 2022. Omdia defines enterprise-level MaaS as cloud-native AI services that help organizations access, customize, and deploy large AI models for real-world business needs.
Omdia used a lifecycle-based framework to evaluate providers, looking at how AI models are built, customized, deployed, and managed. Among nine core capabilities, Alibaba Cloud was rated “advanced” in five areas. These include the variety of foundation models offered, tools for model customization and tuning, AI agent development and scheduling, cost management strategies, and production deployment methods.
“As enterprise AI evolves toward production-ready deployment, we remain committed to providing the platform capabilities, infrastructure as well as our advanced models to help organizations build, deploy and manage AI applications with confidence,” Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said.
The report noted that the enterprise MaaS market has shifted from simple model access, referred to as MaaS 1.0, to broader services that cover the full AI application lifecycle, or MaaS 2.0. Omdia expects further growth toward more integrated and easier-to-use AI services.
Omdia described Alibaba Cloud as a “Full-Stack AI Service Provider,” meaning it combines AI models, computing infrastructure, and development platforms within one system. According to the report, Alibaba Cloud integrates its Qwen models with its Platform for AI (PAI) infrastructure and Model Studio platform.
Model Studio serves as a central access point for enterprise AI projects. It provides standardized tools for using AI models, as well as features for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agent management. Users can access more than 200 models through the platform, including Alibaba’s Qwen and Wan models.
As of September 2025, more than one million enterprise and individual users have used Qwen on Model Studio. Over 800,000 AI agents have been created on the platform for tasks such as content creation, customer support, and operations planning.