Things We Have Learned from Aspara, Part II
In our last week’s blog, we touched on AliCloud’s “core infrastructures” technology such as 5G, AI chips, and cloud-native database. This week, we will highlight some of AliCloud’s efforts on 2B businesses, such as City Brain, OceanBase, and SaaS Accelerator.
Winning cloud contracts from governments is a big deal for public cloud providers. In the US, for example, AWS and Azure are competing fiercely for the $10 billion the U.S Defense Department contract (JEDI contract). Launched in 2016, ET City Brain is a central part of AliCloud’s government cloud offerings. It utilizes comprehensive real-time city data to optimize urban public resources such as environmental protection, traffic control, and resource planning. AliCloud is currently deployed in more than half of the top 20 metropolitan areas in China. For example, in Hangzhou, AliCloud is now able to monitor 350K+ cars in real-time and cut down the average traffic time by 15% (chart below).
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OceanBase was one of the hottest topics in the Aspara 2019 conference. It is a financial-grade distributed relational database independently developed by Alibaba and Ant Financial. First developed in 2010, AliCloud started to commercialize OceanBase by licensing it to external customers, such as Nanjing Bank, Zheshang Bank, and Paytm. On October 4th, Oceanbase made headlines across the tech industry for breaking the world record of database benchmark performance test, by twice the score of Oracle, based on the official results from Transaction Processing Performance Council.
While SaaS is still at its infancy stage in China, tech giants Alibaba and Tencent are already competing fiercely to form their own SaaS ecosystems. Launched in March 2019, AliCloud SaaS Accelerator helps ecosystem partners and customers build and launch SaaS applications efficiently. Some better-known AliCloud SaaS ecosystem partners include Kindee (ERP), DuoGuan (mini-app) and iwhalecloud (telecom solutions). In May 2019, Tencent also launched similar SaaS accelerator programs with partners including Workec (social CRM) and Udesk (SME CRM).
In the 2019 Aspara conference, AliCloud rolled out a new version of the low-code development tool “Yida Plus”. With “Yida Plus”, customers without coding skills can also build an application with easy drag-and-drop functions. Low-code development tool is also becoming very popular among large software platforms such as Microsoft, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
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