Alibaba Named Top-Tier Software Vendor by APPS RUN THE WORLD in the APPS and CLOUD TOP 500 Market Report

Alibaba Strengths, Domain Expertise, and Key Differentiators

Alibaba Group Holding, also referred to as Alibaba Group, is a prominent Chinese multinational technology company with a focus on e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Established in 1999, Alibaba Group offers a comprehensive suite of consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services through web portals. The company also provides electronic payment services, shopping search engines, and cloud computing services.

Alibaba Group oversees an extensive global portfolio of companies spanning various business sectors. Key entities within its ecosystem include Taobao Marketplace, Tmall, Freshippo, AliExpress, Lazada, Alibaba.com, 688.com, Ele.me, Youku, DingTalk, Alimama, Alibaba Cloud, and Cainiao Network.

Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba's own e-commerce ecosystem. It offers a complete suite of cloud services to customers worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualization services, large-scale computing, security, management and application services, big data analytics, a machine learning platform and IoT services.

Alibaba Recent Developments

In August 2023, Alibaba Group's cloud computing unit unveiled two open-sourced artificial intelligence (AI) models, Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, in an effort to compete with Meta's Llama 2. These large language models, each boasting 7 billion parameters, signify Alibaba's entry into open-sourcing Language Model (LLM) technology. This move is considered a potential challenge to the market dominance of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Google, whose AI models often come with high user fees.

The release follows Alibaba Cloud's announcement of its LLM named Tongyi Qianwen in April 2023, which offers various versions with different parameter counts. Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat, described as smaller versions of Tongyi Qiawen, aim to facilitate AI adoption for small and medium businesses.

In October 2021, Alibaba Cloud announced plans to set up data centers in South Korea and Thailand in 2022, to assist local enterprises in their digital innovation journey, in addition to unveiling a slew of products and solutions. Local businesses in South Korea of all sizes will be able to deploy mission-critical workloads while enjoying more reliable and secure cloud services with lower latency. While for Thailand, the data center will offer products and solutions that are in line with Thailand 4.0 - the Thai government’s 20-year strategy to promote digital innovation and the development of sustainable technologies.

Alibaba Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Activities

In November 2023, Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group, a division of the Chinese e-commerce giant, successfully completed the acquisition of Visable, a European business-to-business digital trade platform, according to a source at Alibaba Group.

Post-acquisition, Visable maintained its autonomy, preserving its existing management and organizational structure, while the wholesale marketplace platform AIDC now operates in Europe under the dual brands of Alibaba and Visable. The company is committed to continued investment in its European operations and will contribute technological resources to enhance Visable's B2B platform for the benefit of its European clientele.

At the end of 2019, Alibaba Cloud acquired Terminus, a Chinese software provider founded in 2012 with a strong focus on addressing the needs of retail, procurement, and supply chain functions. The acquisition of Terminus has given Alibaba Cloud an attractive application PaaS solution that it can take to market and help to boost cloud adoption in China. While the Terminus PaaS solution is hosted in Alibaba Cloud and included as part of the cloud portfolio, the platform is positioned as a multi-cloud product that can support any public and private cloud.

Alibaba Customers in ARTW Customer Database

Leveraging a rigorous data-centric research methodology, APPS RUN THE WORLD asks the simple question: Who’s buying Alibaba applications and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. Our Customer database has over 100 data fields that detail company usage of Alibaba and other enterprise apps by function, customer size, industry, location, implementation status, partner involvement, Line of Business Key Stakeholders and IT decision makers contact details. List of Verified Alibaba Cloud customers.

Alibaba Key Enterprise and Cloud Applications

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Revenues, $M:

Alibaba Revenue Breakdown By Type, $M:

Alibaba Enterprise Applications Revenues By Functional Markets, $M:

Alibaba Enterprise Applications Revenues By Verticals, $M:

Alibaba Revenues By Region, $M

Alibaba Direct vs Indirect sales

Alibaba Customers - Breakdown by Geo, Size, Vertical and Product

List of Verified Alibaba Customers

No. of Alibaba Customers: 1.31 billion

No. of Alibaba Enterprise Applications Customers: x

No. of Alibaba Cloud Customers: x

No. of Alibaba Cloud Subscribers: x

During the fiscal year 2022, global consumer-facing businesses within the Alibaba Ecosystem catered to approximately 1.31 billion annual active consumers. This consisted of over 1 billion consumers within China and an additional 305 million consumers outside China, who were served through platforms such as Lazada, AliExpress, Trendyol, and Daraz.

Alibaba Market Opportunities, M&A and Geo Expansions

Alibaba aims to strengthen its position in the global market, traditionally dominated by western technology companies, by continuously enhancing and innovating its products and services. The company strategically leverages emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to achieve this objective.

In October 2021, Alibaba Cloud unveiled Tingwu, an AI-powered meeting assistant, alongside a new version of its cloud computer. The solutions are tailored for the new world of work and address surging demand from corporate users looking to work remotely with more automated support, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. Tingwu is an AI-powered meeting assistant developed by the Speech Lab of Alibaba DAMO Academy (DAMO), the global research initiative by Alibaba Group. The technology works by converting the content of spoken meetings into written minutes in real time with up to 98%* accuracy, delivering an efficient experience for users.

In June 2021 Alibaba Cloud launched an Alibaba Cloud Innovation Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to provide a conducive environment for startups to grow in Malaysia and beyond. The cloud leader will work with Malaysian local partner Handsprofit to bring local expertise to the innovation center, ensuring its smooth operation with strong local connections. The company also hopes to train 30,000 local professionals in the coming fiscal year in Malaysia to strengthen its local talent development commitment.

At the beginning of 2021, Alibaba Cloud launched its third data center in Indonesia. The move is in response to the fast-growing demand from its Indonesian customers, many of whom are increasingly adopting the cloud and rapidly progressing their digital transformation strategies. The expansion comes after Alibaba Cloud Indonesia built its first datacentre in 2018, with the second datacentre constructed in 2019. Upon completion of the third, Alibaba Cloud will have 64 availability zones across 21 regions worldwide.

Alibaba Risks and Challenges

Alibaba Cloud faces the significant challenge of global expansion beyond the Asia-Pacific region, competing with major Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, and IBM.

Alibaba Ecosystem, Partners, Resellers and SI

During the fiscal year 2020, Alibaba Cloud invested US$283 million to empower global partners and accelerate joint innovations in the post-pandemic era. The investment aims to bring its partners up to speed with digitalisation capabilities and create joint products and solutions to benefit even more customers across all sectors. Alibaba Cloud is working with close to 10,000 global partners serving more than 350,000 business customers worldwide. With a strong determination to help partners succeed, Alibaba Cloud has invested heavily in research and development, enabling partners to integrate their products and services on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure platform, so that customers can benefit from the joint solutions for faster time to market. In support of the “to-be-integrated” initiative, to date, together with partners such as MongoDB, Intel, VMware, Salesforce, SAP, Red Hat and Fortinet, Alibaba Cloud has created more than 500 joint solutions catering to industries such as new retail, fintech, manufacturing, media and entertainment.

Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure Insights

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• Alibaba Public Cloud and Infrastructure (IaaS)
• Alibaba Platform (PaaS)
• Alibaba Application Delivery
• Alibaba Private Cloud and Data Centers

Research Methodology

Data used in research reports are derived from publicly available documents, continuous surveys of applications vendors, customers, resellers, Independent Software Vendors, systems integrators and other verifiable sources.

Vendor shares and market forecast results are based on a combination of existing databases as well as demand side and supply side research conducted throughout the year with validation from vendors, customers, channel partners and documentations such as earnings releases and 10Q and 10K filings, vertical industry studies, regional and country-level statistics from public and private institutions(i.e. colleges, universities, government agencies and trade associations).

For additional information on our methodologies, here's the link: