Alibaba Cloud debuts new data intelligence tools


Clare Hopping

26 Feb, 2019

Alibaba Cloud has introduced a set of tools it claims will make it easier for businesses to take advantage of data intelligence and gain greater insight into the running of their business.

Businesses in the retail, fin-tech, logistics, media and entertainment, digital branding, and marketing sectors are expected to be the primary beneficiaries of the new tech.

Alibaba’s Realtime Compute processes events, such as fraud detection, social analytics, and QoS monitoring of telco networks. It then presents these as business insights that can be used to take action based on behaviour displayed.

For businesses that need to manage and analyse large swathes of data, Alibaba has created DataWorks and MaxCompute 2.0 that can together process up to 100 petabytes of data a day.

For businesses with unstructured data sets, Data Lake Analytics can be used to query massive data lakes but only pay for the data crawled.

“Businesses around the world are increasingly relying on data intelligence to drive innovation, digitalise operations, and delight customers,” said Henry Zhang, senior staff product manager at Alibaba Cloud International.

“We work with customers from many industries along this digital transformation journey. We are keen to turn our proven in-house technology into broadly applicable services and pass the benefits on to customers globally so they can quickly build applications on top, such as for 5G, edge computing, and IOT, and shorten the time-to-market.”

Alibaba used this week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona to unveil a number of other tools, including ApsaraDB for MariaDB TX that allows businesses to deploy enterprise, database-centric applications, while SQL Server Enterprise Always On allows organisations to take advantage of high availability and disaster recovery plans.

Cloud Parallel File System offers businesses deploying High Performance Computing workloads to offer the highest levels of efficiency, while Elastic Container Instance makes it easier for Alibaba customers to run containers