New Cloud solutions for European business transformations

Digital transformation is getting serious. Companies across the world are working hard to create a plan that can accelerate their journey in the face of rising competition and growing customer demands.

Businesses in Europe face tougher challenges, especially with strong regulations around data protection, privacy, and security on the anvil. To thrive, companies need strong partners who can take existing technologies, extend their capabilities, and offer services that don’t just deliver on promises but also exceed expectations.

Alibaba Cloud has recently launched eight products ranging from big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to infrastructure, security and private cloud solutions that might make life easier for some of Europe’s CIOs and CTOs.

The array of products are expected to meet the surging demand for powerful and reliable cloud computing services as well as advanced AI solutions among European enterprises to support them to capture opportunities in this digital transformation era.

Alibaba hopes its new line of offerings will benefit the market, especially those in the business of online and offline retail integration, smart manufacturing, and smart city development.

The new products being launched for European enterprises fall into a number of inter-related categories.

In relation to data technology and AI, Alibaba Cloud is launching three key products:

Image search solutions, which allow users to search for information online and offline using images. It is widely applied in a number of scenarios in China including New Retail, a concept that seamlessly converges online and offline retail.

Intelligent services robot is a chatbot for businesses and has served more than 40 million customers in a single day during last year’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival.

Dataphin, an intelligent data engine developed to cope with the cross-industry big data development, management, and application needs. The system manages 95 percent of the entire Alibaba Group’s data and driving all types of data intelligence innovations within the group’s business ecosystem from retail to finance, logistics, transport, and health.

Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the foundation and fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration.

In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch the ECS Baremetal Instance, a new high-performance computing solution of ECS that combines the strengths of virtualized systems and bare metal servers.

When connected as a supercomputer, ECS Baremetal Instances becomes a Super Computing Cluster that will reduce network latency to the level of microseconds while offering elasticity and supercomputing capabilities.

The company will also introduce its next-generation intelligent Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) and Vulnerability Discovery Service, a high-performing security solution.

CEN is a cost-effective solution for broadband and traffic sharing. Instead of setting up routers between nodes to enhance network speed, CEN offers intelligent routing to achieve an optimal network speed.

Vulnerability Discovery Service is a SaaS-based network vulnerability scanning service.

With intelligence feeds, the vulnerability scanning service adaptively discovers network assets such as domains, subdomains, IPs, ports, protocol service, and web components. It continuously assesses the weaknesses of these assets and other types of security defects.

For European enterprises that are looking for a scalable and hybrid cloud services platform, Alibaba Cloud will launch the international version of Apsara Stack, which has a three-year proven track record of market use in China and has been successfully adopted by more than 120 enterprise customers.

These new products, for the first time in Europe, bring Alibaba Cloud’s advanced big data and AI capabilities enabled by supercomputing power.

Speaking about the launch, Alibaba Cloud Europe General Manager Yeming Wang said:

The decision making around how a business is to operate in the digital age is increasingly a strategic one. To meet their changing needs, we are able to leverage our practical experience of digital transformation and successes accumulated in China to the benefit of European enterprises. These advanced solutions will enable organizations in a wide range of sectors and will bring them true connectivity, both locally and globally. For Alibaba Cloud, this is the true meaning of inclusive technology.