Alibaba Cloud is enhancing its ecosystem strategy to meet the emerging demands of customers that are either beginning to pivot to or strengthening their digital services amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cloud adoption has become an essential component in digital transformation and Alibaba Cloud saw significant growth this year. Government lockdowns to curb the pandemic accelerated digital transformation among businesses across all industries. But as the global health situation remains unclear, many companies are opting to invest in cloud strategy for the long haul.

“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, VP, Alibaba Group, and president of Ecosystem and Sales Operations, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, during a media conference held at the sidelines of Apsara Conference 2020.

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Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It provides a suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services.

Philippines Ecosystem Alliance

In the Philippines, Alibaba Cloud launches a new digital ecosystem strategy following the establishment of the Philippines Ecosystem Alliance two months ago.

Realizing the potential of businesses going digital, the strategy will give homegrown companies the tools to fastrack their digital transformation even after the pandemic is over.

“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.

Temenos, Vertica

This new strategy translates to a hyper-localized “grassroots” approach to better support businesses, particulary the SMEs. As part of this effort, Alibaba Cloud is now working with global partners Temenos and Vertica to innovate effective solutions that it can pass on the learning experiences with local partners.

Temenos is a banking software company wherein its Temenos Transact, its next-generation core banking product has been certified on Alibaba Cloud in time for the implementation of the strategy. Financial institutions will be able to run Temenos’ mission-critical core banking applications on Alibaba Cloud and benefit from elastic scalability, cost and operational efficiencies.

Vertica also launched Vertica Analytics Platform on the Alibaba Cloud Platform. Intelligence-driven organizations can now run Vertica’s fast and massively scalable analytics and Machine Learning against the largest data volumes for insights. Philippines enterprises can enjoy the offerings from both companies on Alibaba Cloud.

Alibaba Cloud currently has local partners from various industries such as retail, fintech, media, information communications technology (ICT), business process outsourcing (BPO), healthcare, and education. It has announced to support 5,000 businesses in the Philippines on their digital migration by end-2023. Alibaba Cloud also hopes to train 50,000 and certify at least 10,000 IT professionals within the next three years.

It 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 accelerate joint innovations. In support of the “to-be-integrated” initiative together with partners such as MongoDB, Intel, VMware, Salesforce, SAP, Red Hat and Fortinet, Alibaba Cloud has created more than 500 joint solutions catering to industries such as new retail, fintech, manufacturing, media and entertainment.