Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 sees Alibaba add 8 products to its European cloud offering, all falling in inter-related categories such as big data, AI, infrastructure, security and private cloud.
“Alibaba Cloud wants to be an enabler for technology innovation in Europe helping enterprises do business,” the Chinese company says. “These advanced solutions will enable organisations in a wide range of sectors and will bring them true connectivity, both locally and globally.”
When it comes to data technology and AI, Alibaba offers 3 products-- Image Search solutions (allows users to search for information online and offline using images), Intelligent Services Robot (an enterprise chatbot) and Dataphin (a data engine designed to cope with cross-industry big data development, management and application needs).
Infrastructure and security are covered by ECS Baremetal Instance, a high performance computing solution combining the strengths of virtualised systems and bare metal servers. Customers can connect it as a supercomputer to turn it into a Super Computing Cluster able to reduce network latency to micro-seconds while offering elasticity and supercomputing capabilities.
Also launched are the next generation intelligent Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) and Vulnerability Discovery Service, a high-performing security solution. As for scalable and hybrid cloud services, European customers get an international version of Apsara Stack, a platform that has been in use in China for the past 3 years.
Alibaba first opened a European availability zone in Frankfurt, Germany, in November 2016, and has recently started operating a second one in the same region. It has partnerships with Vodafone in Germany, the UK Met Office and Station F, an innovation hub in France.
