Alibaba Cloud announces Global Marketplace and AliLaunch programme

Source: Alibaba Cloud. Yu.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has unveiled its Global Marketplace and AliLaunch programme for technology partners. This new programme allows international technology partners to target the China market through Alibaba Cloud’s initiatives.

By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing expertise, AliLaunch assists technology partners in overcoming common obstacles that international companies have when expanding into China, including scalability and technology compatibility. Through AliLaunch, these partners can leverage a variety of value-added offerings such as joint ventures, marketplace partnerships and wholesaling to capitalise on this growing market.

As the first step in creating the cloud computing TMall for the China market, the AliLaunch programme can serve as an online “store” that gives Chinese enterprises access to different technology partners which can deploy software or services through Alibaba Cloud.

AliLaunch currently lists 11 technology partners from the US, Europe, Japan and Thailand, including SAP, SUSE and HERE. The partners offer operating systems, as well as software for network infrastructure, security, databases and streaming media. The market also paves the way for technology partners like SAP to explore the China market further through its strategic partnership with Alibaba Cloud.

The global technology partners participating in Alibaba Cloud’s marketplaces include:

 SAP – an enterprise application software provider, SAP will offer SAP HANA One, a cloud-based, in-memory data management solution on Alibaba Cloud’s China marketplace
 SUSE – Linux, cloud infrastructure and storage solutions
 HERE – provides maps and location experiences across multiple screens and operating systems
 Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) – offers the business intelligence software Pentaho
 Check Point – provides a complete security architecture
 AppScale – an open source application platform allowing developers the freedom to run Google App Engine applications in any public or private cloud
 AppEx Networks – software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) services, enterprise-grade connectivity and virtual private networks (VPN)
 Haivision – media management and video streaming solutions
 Hillstone Networks – security solutions for enterprises and data centre networks
 Wowza Media Systems – live and on-demand audio and video streaming 
 TrueIDC – a data centre and cloud provider in Thailand offering data centre and cloud services

“The introduction of AliLaunch demonstrates Alibaba Cloud’s ongoing commitment of building a global cloud computing ecosystem, which connects software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers and business partners from different countries on a unified platform. The AliLaunch programme and Global Technology Partners Marketplace serve as the perfect platforms for making different software products accessible to businesses and organisations in China. We are aiming to build AliLaunch as the TMall* of the cloud computing industry, with more technology partners added in the future,” said Sicheng Yu, VP of Alibaba Group and GM of Alibaba Cloud Global. 

*As China's largest third-party platform for brands and retailers, Tmall is Alibaba Group's B2C platform dedicated to providing a premium shopping experience for Chinese consumers in search of top-quality branded merchandise