Alibaba Cloud says it is investing $283m during this fiscal year to “empower” global partners and “accelerate” joint innovations in the post pandemic era, and wants to recruit more MSPs to help do it. The investment aims to bring partners “up to speed” with digitalisation capabilities and create joint products and solutions to benefit more customers across all sectors.
In collaboration with partners, Alibaba Cloud said it delivered over 2,000 hybrid cloud projects last year to help customers expedite their digitalisation processes. And to equip customers with holistic post migration capabilities, Alibaba said it held 3,000 online classes with partners globally.
“As Alibaba Cloud continues to expand our product and services offerings, we want to bring even more opportunities to our partners so that we can collaboratively innovate to bring the most up-to-date services to our customers and generate business success for them,” said Lancelot Guo, VP of Alibaba Group and GM of ecosystem and sales operations for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“This investment shows our commitment to help partners integrate their businesses with Alibaba and together we will create more value for the global cloud industry.”
Alibaba says it is currently working with almost 10,000 partners serving more than 350,000 business customers worldwide. In support of its “to-be-integrated” initiative, to date, together with partners such as MongoDB, Intel, VMware, Salesforce, SAP, Red Hat and Fortinet, Alibaba Cloud says it has created more than 500 joint solutions catering to industries such as new retail, fintech, manufacturing, media and entertainment.
Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud says it now wants to broaden ISV, MSP and SI partner recruitment, “leveraging” their innovation and technology capabilities to enhance its platform offering for customers. It aims to introduce new and improved work processes with partners to increase communication efficiency, so that the parties can respond quickly to changing customer demands, especially during “black swan events” such as the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is committed to “deep-diving” into retail, financial services, healthcare and life sciences and education to meet “surging customer demand”. Alibaba will also enhance its partner go-to-market incentives to bring the best offering and innovation for customers to accelerate their digital transformation goals.
Last October, Arrow signed an EMEA-wide agreement with Alibaba to distribute its full suite of cloud services. Alibaba established its presence in the UK in 2018 with the launch of two data centres in the London area, adding to its European location in Frankfurt, Germany, where it does business from an ex-Vodafone data centre. Last May, Alibaba added an additional nine partners to its EMEA Ecosystem Partner Program which was launched in 2018. These included Cloud Temple, Equinix, EVA Group, Groupe Cyllene, GTI Software & Networking, PROJIXI Europe, SKALE-5, SMILE and Xebia. Existing EMEA partners included Linkbynet, Ecritel, Micropole and Intel.
