Decoding the two key codes for Alibaba Cloud's successful ecosystem operation: openness and two-way empowerment

As early as when he joined Alibaba Cloud in 2011, Yang Ming discovered that ecology had become Alibaba Cloud's core strategy. In August 2014, Alibaba Cloud launched the "Cloud Alliance Plan" to gather partners, build a new cloud ecosystem, and provide one-stop cloud services for enterprises, governments, etc.

Over the past three years, the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem has gradually expanded, and the Cloud Integration Plan has also ushered in new upgrades, forming a product ecosystem, industry ecosystem, regional ecosystem, cloud market, and education ecosystem.

According to statistics, Alibaba Cloud has occupied more than 50% of the domestic public cloud computing market. This was confirmed by Li Zhenning, deputy general manager of Zhongbiao Software. In the past year, he participated in the review of many local government projects and found that more than half of the actual backend operating environment of small and medium-sized enterprises was Alibaba Cloud. This also strengthened his confidence in cooperating with Alibaba Cloud.

Yang Yuchun, president of Chanjet, which provides IT services to millions of small and medium-sized enterprises, has experienced the help that Alibaba Cloud provides to small and micro enterprises. Chanjet builds mainstream applications on the Alibaba Cloud platform. The reason why it chooses to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud is that compared with other cloud computing platforms, Alibaba Cloud has the highest commercial maturity represented by providing one-stop services. This move will not only reduce operation and maintenance costs, but also be safer, more stable, and more objective.

A detailed account of Alibaba Cloud's new ecosystem

If you take stock, you will find how "rich" the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem is.

In terms of product ecology, Alibaba Cloud has successively opened up more than 90 product-level collaborations. For example, UFIDA, SAP, etc. have developed and integrated a wealth of products based on Alibaba Cloud.

In terms of industry ecology, Alibaba Cloud and its partners have built more than 20 solutions involving big data, finance, security and other industries; "Behind many customers, there are partners in addition to Alibaba Cloud," said Yang Ming.

Alibaba Cloud's "Cloud Market" is similar to Apple's App Store, and is divided into seven categories: basic software, enterprise applications, website promotion, services and training, cloud security, data and API, and solutions. More than 4,000 software programs from more than 1,200 well-known software vendors at home and abroad have been realized online services. By the end of last year, 10 software companies in Alibaba Cloud Market had a quarterly transaction volume of over 1 million yuan, and 3 partners had a quarterly transaction volume of over 10 million yuan.

In terms of regional ecology, Alibaba Cloud has developed a partner system of more than 5,000 partners, including more than 50 authorized centers, covering all first- and second-tier cities and some third- and fourth-tier regions in the country.

Alibaba Cloud has also developed more than 180 partner institutions and more than 20 training and education partners to cultivate talents in five major professional fields: cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, cloud security, and artificial intelligence, and has trained and empowered more than 100,000 ecosystem developers.

Yang Ming believes that the reason why China has achieved such brilliant success in building an ecosystem is nothing more than two key factors: openness and mutual empowerment.

Yang Ming predicts that Alibaba Cloud, a cloud computing platform, will be built into a social public computing and network platform in the future. As the operating end of the platform, Alibaba Cloud will collaborate with partners for mutual benefit and provide the most valuable cloud services to end users.

Open, open quickly

Yang Ming recalled that the biggest change in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem during its development process is that it is becoming more and more open, which is closely related to the form and history of its partners.

In the early days, partners simply acted as agents for Alibaba Cloud products. When system integrators and professional service providers joined in, in addition to reselling cloud resources, they also integrated their Alibaba Cloud-based products with Alibaba Cloud to serve enterprises in new product forms, which meant that the nature and type of Alibaba Cloud partners had changed. In the process of product integration, Alibaba Cloud gradually opened up its technology, which in turn attracted more partners to participate.

The degree of openness of Alibaba Cloud is amazing.

Today, certain partners can directly contact local enterprises or industry users (the cloud market is a very persuasive environment), and even provide technical services, consulting services, and door-to-door services on behalf of Alibaba Cloud. Even Zhongbiao Software, the lowest-level operating system of the basic operation and maintenance platform, can have a place in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem, which shows the appeal of the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.

"From sales to the opening of products and technologies, and then to the opening of resources and users, Alibaba Cloud will continue to move forward along this path," said Yang Ming.

With more and more partners joining, Alibaba Cloud's ecosystem is becoming larger and more influential in the industry, and its ability and scope of providing support and services to users are becoming stronger and stronger.

Empowerment, two-way empowerment

The "empowerment" advocated by Alibaba Cloud is mutual empowerment between both parties. The ultimate goal is to make the cloud computing industry an inclusive technology, rather than just making Alibaba Cloud an inclusive technology.

Managing a large ecosystem brings pressures that are beyond imagination. Alibaba Cloud has provided a series of measures. Here are just two or three examples.

1. Comprehensive empowerment system services

Alibaba Cloud has launched a huge Eco Partner System (APS), an ecosystem platform based on cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence. It helps partners quickly develop cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence-related businesses based on Alibaba Cloud by providing business, technology, marketing, training and financial support. Partners who join have the opportunity to develop new businesses or solutions, receive support from business, technology, sales, marketing and market resources, and achieve rapid growth with the help of the Eco Partner System.

Taking the training provided to partners as an example, Alibaba Cloud has set up a dedicated platform. With a simple registration, one can learn a wealth of knowledge from this platform, including cloud computing courses, enterprise-level Internet architecture (Aliware) courses, security courses, case sharing in nearly 20 industries, job courses, and can also sign up for offline courses held in various places and communicate face-to-face with instructors. The empowerment platform also provides a large number of downloadable documents, live broadcasts or video playbacks. After completing the course, one can even take certification exams to obtain relevant qualifications.

2. Attract more enterprise customers

Alibaba Cloud provides a differentiated cooperation model. For small and medium-sized enterprises, it focuses on SaaS rapid deployment and promotes Chanjet Software solutions. For sensitive industries, Alibaba Cloud focuses on recommending Winning Software. In addition, the promotion methods are also different. Large enterprises mainly use on-site consultation and offline signing, while small and medium-sized enterprises mainly promote online direct delivery.

Alibaba Cloud focuses on providing one-stop services to bring maximum convenience and reduce workload for users, especially small and medium-sized enterprises that lack funds and talent.

3. Investing 100 million yuan to support 1 million small and medium-sized enterprises, Yunhe plans to upgrade again

At the Chengdu Summit of the Yunqi Conference on May 23, Alibaba Cloud, together with well-known domestic and foreign software companies such as Cisco, SAP, Informatica, NetApp, Zhongbiao Software, UFIDA Chanjet, WeBank, Fortinet, and Lenovo Cloud, released the "1100 Ecosystem Codes", jointly opened the cloud market software brand pavilion, launched a 15-day free trial plan for commercial software, and invested 100 million yuan to support 1 million small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve intelligent transformation and accelerate the implementation of the cloud integration plan.