Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has unveiled its first international Product Innovation Center and Partner Management Center, to further enhance customer services and better facilitate the digitalisation journey of customers. The company is reaffirming its commitment to global customers, starting from its international headquarters in Singapore, where these centres are based.
The Product Innovation Center will help facilitate future roadmaps for developing more market-specific solutions. It will also oversee the management of product upgrades based on ongoing global customer demands.
The Partner Management Center, on the other hand, will delve into local collaborations to deepen the sharing of leading technologies and domain expertise among partners, in order to serve local customers’ needs.
Accelerating local businesses
In addition to creating more job opportunities for local talent, these initiatives also aim to enhance more local collaborations through the creation of a new Innovation Accelerator Program to support businesses to expand and meet the demands of the fast-growing global digital economy.
This program brings together industry leaders and experts to help develop more innovative and resilient businesses in Singapore through sharing of practical skills and ideas, and providing ease of access to the latest niche cloud technologies. What’s more, companies that are selected under the program will also receive training and technical support from Alibaba Cloud and industry experts.
The program also helps internationalise the innovations of companies in Singapore by providing them opportunities to plug into Alibaba Cloud’s dynamic global ecosystem, supporting businesses with their digital transformation and innovation journeys through upskilling, retraining, and technical upgrade schemes.
“Today we are in a very early stage of digitalisation,” said Dr Wang Jian, Member of Chinese Engineering Academy and founder of Alibaba Cloud. “In the next five to 10 years, the economy is going to be driven and measured by computing consumption. Digital economy is the economy of computing, and cloud computing will play the same role in the era of digitalisation as electricity played in the era of electrification. The cloud is becoming a methodology not just for cloud computing, but a methodology for most people doing their work.”
Sustainability program
Alibaba Cloud will also be working with partners to help 10,000 global companies accelerate their sustainability journey over the next three years. Businesses in Singapore will be offered a pilot program of Energy Expert to help reduce their carbon footprint. Energy Expert is a proprietary SaaS sustainability platform launched by Alibaba Cloud in June last year. It helps measure, analyse, and manage the carbon emissions of business activities and products while providing actionable insights and energy-saving recommendations to companies in helping them achieve their carbon emission goals.
“With the setup of our first international Product Innovation Center and Partner Management Center in Singapore, our global headquarters for Alibaba Cloud, we are committed to continuously supporting global businesses in their digital transformation journey. The new initiatives and the strengthening of our talented workforce further illustrate our support for global customers with ambitions to expand and upgrade their innovation capabilities, while delivering on their sustainability goals,” said Selina Yuan, Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International Business Unit.
Cybersecurity Certified
In addition to initiatives to give businesses an edge, Alibaba Cloud has also been working to bring enhanced cybersecurity and protection services for their customers. They recently attained the Cyber Trust (Advocate) mark certification, which is developed by Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency (CSA)and is targeted at larger or more digitalised organisations to help organisations communicate their investment in cybersecurity as a competitive edge and to build trust with their customers.
The Cyber Trust (Advocate) mark is the CSA’s highest certification tier.
Supporting customers’ digitalisation
Supporting firms in their digitalisation ambitions is one of Alibaba Cloud’s core focuses, and they have been helping organisations in sectors such as retail to digitally transform and achieve the efficiencies of modern digital organisations across the world.
Gadget MIX, for example, is a Singapore-based retailer of high-tech digital products that uses Alibaba Cloud’s solutions to digitalise its retail strategy. They have over 20 outlets across the country and a robust e-commerce presence, and were keen to partner with Alibaba Cloud to improve their internal communications, streamline business operations, and seamlessly migrate to the cloud.
“The solutions provided by Alibaba Cloud have helped to lower our total cost of ownership and streamline business operations, thus speeding up our business transformation efforts. In particular, the deployment of DingTalk has helped us to improve workflow management and team collaborations as well as our business and internal communications,” said Ray Yue, CEO of Gadget MIX.
Similarly, the partnership between Alibaba Cloud and Project Twelve (P12), a web3 gaming platform, is an example of how niche capabilities in-built with cloud technologies can achieve global success.
Through adopting technologies by Alibaba Cloud, Project Twelve is now able to focus on building up its core competency – scalable game deployment – while significantly lowering the risk of cyberattacks and providing a secure environment for its users to play games. Alibaba Cloud’s game accelerator solution and security products such as Game Shield and Anti-DDos help P12 to raise its security capabilities by several notches.
At the same time, Alibaba Cloud’s cloud native database, PolarDB, helps P12 create a seamless user experience for gaming from anywhere in the world by reducing maintenance time and improving uptime.
With regard to the value of its partnership with Alibaba Cloud, Boyang, Founder of P12 said, “With added assurance for a secure gaming experience within P12 platform, we can focus our efforts on elevating the platform with quality games and sustainable economy in the fast-moving and dynamic web3 gaming industry. Alibaba Cloud’s solutions have helped us to provide our users with smoother gaming experiences and scale accordingly to peak demands with high availability and low latency.”
Alibaba Cloud has been working with logistics players as well. This includes JUSTI Pte Ltd (JUSTI), a homegrown investment holding company whose main investment portfolio includes a last-mile delivery operation. Alibaba Cloud’s solutions have helped them digitalise and streamline their logistic networks.
“Alibaba Cloud’s AI-driven EasyDispatch solution with embedded vehicle routing problem functionality improves our field dispatch capabilities and efficiency in real time. By utilising Alibaba Cloud’s technologies, we can have better visibility and control over each step of our delivery chains, such as parcel status tracking, real-time AI route designing, and task scheduling. They have greatly reduced our manpower cost and increased our customers’ satisfaction,” said Li Chao Ming, Managing Director of JUSTI.
Bringing Industry 4.0 closer to reality
The product innovation and partner management centres are further manifestations of Alibaba Cloud’s commitment to its global customers as the company accelerates the innovation drive from its international headquarters in Singapore.
The cloud leader’s attainment of the highest tier of cybersecurity certifications — while building a strong foundation for the digital transformation journeys of local organisations as they go global — also enhances trust in its solutions among companies across the globe.
To realise Industry 4.0, businesses will have to innovate and collaborate on a global scale. A startup mindset among organisations and professionals, and a more innovative and deep technology-driven economy are essential to realise the benefits of Industry 4.0. Developing a leadership of global standards in deep technologies is also a key requirement. Alibaba Cloud is building a highly secure and intelligent infrastructure backbone for companies in Singapore and globally to target the benefits of Industry 4.0 with its latest initiatives.
