Alibaba Cloud builds an "Agricultural Brain" service

Alibaba Cloud is launching a proprietary ET Agricultural Brain service that taps into its AI technologies such as visual recognition, voice recognition and real-time environmental parameter monitoring.

The AI program has been adopted already by a number of pig farms, where the Agricultural Brain monitors each hog’s daily activity, growth indicators, pregnancy and other health conditions, bringing more insight throughout the pig farming industry chain.

Simon HU, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud said: “Agriculture and animal husbandry industry is a strategic sector and matters to the lives of billions across China. At Alibaba Cloud, we are committed to using our world-class technology to resolve real-life problems. For this reason, we launched ET Agricultural Brain with a number of partners in the agriculture sector. We believe enhanced operating efficiency will help ensure pork supply and maintain a stable market price that will benefit enterprises and consumers alike in China. In the future, ET Agricultural Brain can be adopted across many other sectors, including forestry and fisheries, helping enterprises and individual farmers increase efficiency and improve quality of production and providing a greener and healthier option for consumers.”

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Commvault adds tie-in to Alibaba Cloud

Commvault, which specializes in enterprise backup, recovery, archive and the cloud, announced a strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud to deliver scalable hybrid cloud data management solutions. The strategic partnership includes the joint delivery of:

• Integrated features on a single unified platform
• Advanced centralized support
• Innovative, personalized offerings

Dajiang Han, Head of Global Alliance, Alibaba Cloud Global said, "We are excited to enter this strategic partnership with Commvault and concertedly empower our customers through advanced cloud computing and data management capabilities. Digital transformation is the new benchmark for companies amidst an increasingly competitive landscape, and data is at the core of this journey. As cloud continues to serve as the backbone of today's digital economy, Alibaba Cloud and Commvault are committed to deliver innovative technologies to address the ever-growing challenges in data storage, processing, management and protection."

"The strategic combination of Commvault's leadership in backup & recovery and moving data to, from and between clouds and Alibaba Cloud's strengths will provide customers with scalable and secure cloud data solutions, while supporting the acceleration of digital transformations across the globe," said Owen Taraniuk, Vice President of Worldwide Partnerships and Market Development, Commvault.

• Commvault has existing cloud partnership with multiple players, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

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Alibaba Looks to Intel FPGAs for Cloud Acceleration Service

Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun), is kicking off a pilot program with Intel for a cloud-based FPGA (field programmable gate array) acceleration service.

Specifically, Aliyun will use Intel Arria 10 FPGAs, Intel Xeon processor-based servers and software development tools for application acceleration as a ready-to-go preconfigured infrastructure.  The Aliyun service offers systems designers cloud-based workload acceleration as an alternative to investing in on-premises FPGA infrastructure.

“At Alibaba Cloud, we offer customers access to a number of services in the cloud, and adding an FPGA-based acceleration offering means they can access that powerful computing without the cost or requirement of building out their own infrastructure,” said Jin Li, senior director, Alibaba Cloud. “This service greatly adds to our value as a leading provider of highly scalable cloud computing and data management services that provide businesses with flexible, reliable connectivity.”

“Intel FPGAs are enabling exciting new business models such as Alibaba’s approach of using FPGAs to accelerate diverse workloads via cloud services,” said Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and general manager, Intel Programmable Solutions Group. “In addition, Intel offers customers scalable solutions for accelerated computing with its data center leadership in Intel Xeon processors, FPGAs, optimized tools and software, and a global partner ecosystem across the spectrum of deployment models.”

http://www.intel.com

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Aliyun Looks to AMD for Cloud-based GPUs

AMD and Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) announced a collaboration to strengthen research and cooperation related to the use of AMD Radeon Pro GPU technology in Alibaba Cloud’s global data centers.

“The partnership between AMD and Alibaba Cloud will bring both of our customers more diversified, cloud-based graphic processing solutions. It is our vision to work together with leading technology firms like AMD to empower businesses in every industry with cutting-edge technologies and computing capabilities,” said Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud.

“The collaboration between AMD and Alibaba Cloud leverages the world-class technology and software engineering capabilities of both companies to meet the growing demand for standards-based GPU computing solutions capable of enabling more immersive and intuitive cloud services,” said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “Working closely with industry leaders like Alibaba Cloud helps ensure the investments AMD is making in our high-performance graphics and computing datacenter products continue to align with the needs of the broader cloud market.”

At this week's Computing Conference in Hangzhou, China, AMD is conducting the following demos:

• An Alibaba Cloud Single Root Input/Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) Solution featuring AMD Radeon Pro server technology. The demo is powered by the Radeon FirePro™ S7150 x2 GPU featuring AMD Multi-user GPU (MxGPU) hardware-based server virtualization technology. The solution features the industry’s only hardware-virtualized GPU technology, which provides guaranteed service levels and improves security for remote workstation, cloud gaming, cloud computing, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) implementations.
• A virtual reality (VR) experience demo powered by AMD Radeon VR Ready Premium graphics featuring AMD’s powerful, energy efficient Polaris graphics architecture.

http://www.amd.com

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Alibaba Rack Up 156% Revenue Growth for AliCloud

Alibaba cited 156% YoY revenue for Aliyun, its cloud division, where the segment adjusted EBITA narrowed to $(24) million.  The figure puts Aliyun on a faster growth trajectory than AWS or Azure, which also reported strong growth numbers during the first half of 2016. However, Aliyun remains much smaller, with Q2 revenue of US$187 million.

Cloud computing paying customers increased 119% YoY to 577k.  Aliyun launched 319 new products and features during the quarter.

The company said Aliyun's adjusted EBITA margin significantly improved YoY due to robust revenue growth and economies of scale.

http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/ir/presentations/pre160811.pdf

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99Cloud and Aliyun Partner on OpenStack Cloud

Aliyun, the largest cloud operator in China, and China’s leading OpenStack service provider, 99Cloud, agreed to collaborate on hybrid cloud solutions for business customers.

99Cloud will leverage its expertise in the design, deployment, implementation, and operation of OpenStack platforms.  These will be integrated into the Aliyun public cloud through tailor-made APIs. Jointly, 99Cloud and Aliyun will provide customers with best enterprise hybrid cloud experiences.

http://www.openstack.org/news/view/166/99cloud-and-aliyun-bring-production-quality-hybrid-cloud-seamlessly-integrated-with-openstack

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Aliyun Clocks in at 175% YoY Growth Rate

Alibaba Group reported very strong performance in Q1, with revenues coming in at RMB 24,184 million (US$3,751 million), an increase of 39% year-over-year.

Alibaba's China retail marketplaces revenue was RMB18,340 million (US$2,844 million), an increase of 41% YoY.  Mobile revenue was RMB13,084 million (US$2,029 million), an increase of 149% YoY. Annual active buyers on our China retail marketplaces increased to 423 million, an increase of 16 million over the prior quarter, while mobile MAUs in March reached 410 million, an increase of 17 million over December 2015.

Aliyun (or AliCloud in English), the company's cloud business unit, is seeing even faster growth, with revenue increasing 175% year-over-year to RMB1,066 million (US$165 million), representing an acceleration of the 126% year-over-year growth rate achieved in the prior quarter.

As of March 31, 2016, AliCloud had over 2.3 million customers, including more than 500,000 paying customers. In the March quarter, AliCloud launched 612 new features and services and 22 new products, including 12 in the big data category. Big data products include computing engines, data collection and data analysis, with a MaxCompute service empowering customers to process up to 100 petabytes of data in under six hours.

http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p160505.pdf

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Aliyun to Open Singapore Cloud Data Center

Alibaba's Aliyun cloud computing arm is completing construction of a new cloud data center in Singapore.  The facility, which will be Aliyun's headquarters for overseas business, is slated for an early September launch.

The new cloud data center leverages on Alibaba Group’s recent US$1 billion investment for cloud computing, and will enable more businesses to benefit from secure and reliable Aliyun-powered cloud services while riding on record foreign direct investment flows in Southeast Asia.

This is Aliyun's seventh data center globally. It will have direct connections to Aliyun's data center network via Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Silicon Valley.

“Singapore is a natural destination to be our headquarters for overseas expansion. The city state is a natural springboard into the Asia Pacific region, not only for us, but for our target audience. We are seeing healthy demand for cloud-related data management services in Singapore because of the ease of doing business, comprehensive transport and telecommunications connections and robust intellectual property regime. The stable geo-political climate and abundance of highly skilled talent are advantages too,” said Sicheng (Ethan) Yu, Vice President of Aliyun.

http://www.aliyun.com

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Aliyun Vows Data Protection for Customers

At its inaugural Data Technology (DT) event this week in Beijing. Alibaba's Aliyun division announced its Data Protection Pact - a pledge to customers and partners to protect the privacy and integrity of their data.

Here is Aliyun's statement to the technology industry and the entire society:

1. Customers, such as individual developers, companies, governments, and social institutions, have absolute ownership over any and all data generated on the Alibaba Cloud Computing (Aliyun) platform, including the rights to freely and safely access, share, exchange, transfer or delete their data at any time.
   
2. Customers have the right to select whatever services they choose to securely process their data. This data cannot in any way be altered or transferred by Alibaba Cloud Computing (Aliyun).
   
3. As such that banks are obligated to protect clients' financial assets, the obligation also falls on Alibaba Cloud Computing (Aliyun) to protect our customers' data. It is the responsibility and duty of Alibaba Cloud Computing (Aliyun) to establish a set of strict management, control and internal audit systems, as well as strive to continuously improve our threat protection, disaster recovery and other capabilities to strengthen the protection we offer to customers regarding data privacy, integrity, and accessibility.

During Data Technology Day event, Aliyun presented its full landscape of cloud-computing products and solutions. Aliyun has developed more than 14 cloud products and 50 solutions for enterprises and individual developers across eight sectors, including gaming, multimedia, e-government, medical treatment, IoT, and finance. Additional solutions are provided by more than 200 companies partnering with Aliyun.

New solutions from Aliyun include Solid State Drive (SSD) cloud storage servers with strong read-write capability, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) systems used to build hybrid cloud and cloud databases compatible with Oracle systems, and batch computing services used in gene sequencing and computer-graphics rendering.

"The huge amount of data and advanced computing capacity has brought great business opportunities to the industry," said Wensong Zhang, Chief Technology Officer of Aliyun. "Deep learning and high-performance computing have been widely adopted in Alibaba Group for internal use. Aliyun will roll out high-performance computing services and accelerators based on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology that could be applied in image recognition and deep learning to expand the boundaries of business."

http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/article?news=p150722a

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Alibaba's Aliyun Announces Cloud Marketplace Alliance Program

Alibaba's Aliyun cloud computing arm, is launching a global Marketplace Alliance Program (MAP) to boost public cloud services worldwide. The MAP program will provide enterprises worldwide with access to Alibaba cloud computing’s public cloud solutions. Essentially, the program enables Aliyun to localize its cloud computing offerings by partnering with other leading players.

Aliyun has data centers in Beijing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Silicon Valley, and Dubai (under construction). As of June 30, 2014, Aliyun served more than 1.4 million customers directly and indirectly through independent service providers.

The initial Aliyun’s MAP partners include Intel, Singtel, Dubai holding company Meraas Holdings, Equinix, Hong Kong's PCCW, French website hosting and cloud services provider LINKBYNET, and Hong Kong public utility Towngas.

“The new Aliyun program is designed to bring our customers the best cloud computing solutions by partnering with some of the most respected technology brands in the world. We will continue to bring more partners online to grow our cloud computing ecosystem,” said Sicheng (Ethan) YU, vice president, Aliyun.

Commenting on the scheme, Raejeanne Skillern, general manager of Cloud Service Provider Business at Intel Corporation said, "For years Intel and Alibaba have collaborated on optimizing hardware and software technology across the data center for Alibaba's unique workloads. As a partner in Aliyun's Marketplace Alliance Program, Intel looks forward to continuing our collaboration to promoting joint technology solutions that are based on Intel Architecture specifically tailored to the rapidly growing market of international public cloud consumers."

“As one of the first global partners of Aliyun, Singtel will offer our customers even more choices in cloud infrastructure platforms in China and around the world,” said Lim Seng Kong, Singtel’s managing director (Global Enterprise Business). “With Singtel’s strong Managed Cloud services capabilities, extensive customer reach and strong suite of information and communications technology services, we can also provide the springboard for Aliyun to grow its footprint in the Asia-Pacific, which is one of the fastest growing markets for cloud services.”

http://www.aliyun.com

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