CLOUD STORAGE
Alibaba Cloud | September 23, 2022
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has announced its latest international strategic roadmap at the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit. During the three-day summit, the trusted cloud provider has revealed new products to support technology innovation among enterprises, an investment of USD1 billion for a global partner ecosystem upgrade, and enhanced customer services to provide comprehensive support throughout a customer's digitalization journey.
Technology innovation to power rapidly increasing cloud consumption
With more enterprises moving to the cloud and an increase in demand for cloud services in a hybrid environment, Alibaba Cloud has made available globally a series of its proven infrastructure products, a multi-model cloud-native database and distributed cloud services. This range of new products aims to provide enterprise customers with a wider scope of cloud services covering network, storage and compute.
Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) 2.0, the newly available network services, provides global intelligent networking to support enterprises' global expansion. CEN 2.0 supports ultra-large-scale networking capabilities with higher availability, lower latency, enhanced security capability and greater flexibility in pricing options for enterprises, compared to the previous version.
Alibaba Cloud has also unveiled a storage product called ESSD Auto PL, which provides block storage services and supports automatic scaling within seconds to allow businesses to handle sudden traffic surges. As the world's leading elastic block storage product with auto-scaling function, it offers up to one million IOPS (input/output operations per second), significantly higher than the industry average.
Lindorm, the cloud-native multi-model database developed by Alibaba Cloud, successfully supported Alibaba Group's 11.11, the world's largest shopping festival, last year. Designed for fusion-processing requirements for wide tables, time series, space-time and various unstructured data, Lindorm has also been supporting customers in various industries in China – including automotive, finance and manufacturing – thanks to its high availability and low storage cost.
Alibaba Cloud also introduced ACK One (Alibaba Cloud Distributed Cloud Container Platform), a multi-region and multi-cluster container management platform to provide a consistent management, delivery and operation experience for enterprises. It allows users to implement container cluster management, resource scheduling, data disaster recovery and application delivery through a unified platform, whether in a public cloud, private cloud or on-premise environment. ACK One is the latest addition to ACK Anywhere, Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes. Earlier this year, among the eight significant industry players evaluated, Alibaba Cloud was named a "Leader" in The Forrester Wave™ Public Cloud Container Platforms Q1 2022 for the first time.
Lastly, to support enterprises' need for hybrid cloud, CloudBox integrates Alibaba Cloud's public cloud infrastructure technologies such as compute, storage and network to provide enterprises with fully managed cloud services for deployment close to customers' business premises. CloudBox delivers a consistent experience as Alibaba Cloud's public cloud, while meeting enterprises' demand for on-premise data processing and low latency compute. CloudBox is designed for multinational companies with business operations in China.
Alibaba Cloud has been strengthening its capabilities in computing, storage, network and security. For example, its recently unveiled Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU), a dedicated processing unit designed for its Apsara Cloud operating system, can reduce network latency to as low as five microseconds and improve computing power performance in data-intensive AI and data analytics scenarios by as much as 30%.
Prioritizing partner benefits to build inclusive technology ecosystem
With its revamped ecosystem strategy, Alibaba Cloud has announced that it is committed to investing USD1 billion to support partners' technology innovation and their market expansion with Alibaba Cloud in the coming three fiscal years. This investment consists of both financial and non-financial incentives, such as funding, rebates and go-to-market initiatives.
To accelerate partners' growth, Alibaba Cloud also launched a "Regional Accelerator" program to provide partners operating in different markets with a localized business collaboration model. The model is designed around factors such as a market's level of technical maturity, vertical focus, digitalization needs and business demands, with an aim to boost partners' income and strengthen their technical expertise. Alibaba Cloud ecosystem partners including resellers, technology partners (ISV, SaaS and SI), service and consulting partners can benefit from the program.
"Partners have always been a key focus for Alibaba Cloud, and we are committed to providing them with strong support for our ongoing co-creation and value-add – both technologically and commercially to further empower our joined customers, Our revamped partner strategy prioritizes our partners' growth. By continuing to support our partners' business expansion, we can build an inclusive ecosystem benefiting partners and customers."
Selina Yuan, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence International President
To address complications with partners' international business operations, Alibaba Cloud has also upgraded its collaboration model with its ISV partners, with a focus on enhancing industry collaboration, standardizing go-to-market process, and accelerating technical solution integration to increase efficiency. Looking ahead, Alibaba Cloud hopes to recruit more financial services, retail, internet and manufacturing ISVs to co-develop products and support customer innovation.
Alibaba Cloud currently works with about 11,000 partners worldwide, including Salesforce, VMware, Fortinet, IBM and Neo4j.
Empowering customers with comprehensive support
In order to provide all-round cloud-based solutions and services to all customers, Alibaba Cloud also launched a "Global Delivery and Service Program" to enhance the cloud adoption process for customers. Under the program, it has unveiled three Customer Service Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Porto (Portugal), and Mexico City (Mexico), to support customers in their cloud adoption journey, providing timely and regionalized cloud migration and consulting services.
In addition to the Customer Service Centers, Alibaba Cloud has set up three Service Delivery Centers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and Hong Kong (Greater China), to provide extra technology support to its regional offices and customer project delivery in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Fueling new innovations with reliable infrastructure
During the summit, Alibaba Cloud has inked nearly 30 agreements to help customers and partners accelerate their digital innovation capabilities with leading cloud computing technologies.
In collaboration with JP Games, Japan's leading game development studio, Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a set of new services to create virtual spaces and realistic avatars for global customers venturing into the metaverse.
Together with MetaverseXR, Thailand's leading metaverse company, Alibaba Cloud rolled out a comprehensive suite of metaverse solutions for the Thai market in order to fulfill growing local demand for embarking on a Web 3.0 journey.
Alibaba Cloud also teamed up with UMG Group in Myanmar, to power the country's digital transformation – especially in traditional industries.
With BeLive and VisionTech from Singapore, Alibaba Cloud is expanding its regional outreach in the media and Fintech verticals.
Alibaba Cloud is collaborating with OnFinality, a leading New Zealand-based blockchain infrastructure provider, to offer robust cloud-computing capability and a strong global network for Web 3.0 developers looking to scale globally.
More than 300 Alibaba Cloud customers and partners around the globe are attending the summit, including Accenture, Tiger Brokers, DANA, Thai Data, and Lala station.
About Alibaba Cloud
Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. 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 maintained its position as the third leading public cloud IaaS service provider globally since 2018, according to IDC. Alibaba is the world's third leading and Asia Pacific's leading IaaS provider by revenue in U.S. dollars since 2018, according to Gartner.
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CLOUD SECURITY
Elastic | September 26, 2022
Kyndryl the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, and Elastic the company behind Elasticsearch, today announced an expanded global partnership to provide customers full-stack observability, enabling them to accelerate their ability to search, analyze and act on machine data (IT data and business data) stored across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge computing environments.
Under the partnership, Kyndryl and Elastic will collaborate on creating joint solutions and delivery capabilities designed to provide deep, frictionless observability at all levels of applications, services, and infrastructure to address customer data, analytics and IT operations management challenges.
The companies will focus on delivering large-scale IT operations and AIOps capabilities to joint customers by leveraging Kyndryl’s data framework and toolkits and Elastic’s Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, enabling streamlined migrations, modernized infrastructure and tenant management, and AI development for efficient and proactive IT management.
As part of the partnership, Kyndryl and Elastic plan to collaborate to support customer needs and requirements via joint offerings and solutions across the following areas:
IT Data Modernization – Helping organizations manage exponential storage growth and giving them the capability to search for data wherever it resides.
IT Data Management Services for Elastic – Providing flexibility to users of Elastic by letting Kyndryl manage the entire stack infrastructure and analytics workloads for IT operations.
Intelligent IT Analytics – Enabling actionable observability through AI/ML capabilities that deliver unified insights for proactive and efficient IT operations with technology domain-specific insights.
Data Migration Services for Elastic – Delivering the capability to streamline migrations and deploy self-managed Elastic workloads to the hyperscalers of a customer’s choice.
Kyndryl’s global team of data management experts will also participate in the global Elastic certification program to expand their expertise in advising, implementing and managing Elastic solutions across critical IT projects and environments.
“Customers in all industries are seeking to improve their capacity to search and analyze the data stored in the cloud and on edge computing environments, We are happy to partner with Elastic to create and bring forward a unified approach that will help customers overcome hurdles and improve their ability to access and gain insights at scale from their business data.”
Nicolas Sekkaki, Applications, Data & AI global practice leader for Kyndryl
“Enabling customers to gain actionable insights from their data is a key enabler of data-driven digital transformation,” said Scott Musson, Vice President, Worldwide Channel and Alliances at Elastic. “The combination of Kyndryl’s global expertise in managing mission-critical information systems and the proven scale and flexibility of the Elastic Search Platform provides the critical foundation to help organizations drive speed, scale, and productivity, and address their observability needs across hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and edge computing environments.”
About Kyndryl
Kyndryl is the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider serving thousands of enterprise customers in more than 60 countries. The Company designs, builds, manages and modernizes the complex, mission-critical information systems that the world depends on every day. For more information, visit www.kyndryl.com.
About Elastic
Elastic is a leading platform for search-powered solutions. We help organizations, their employees, and their customers accelerate the results that matter. With solutions in Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security, we enhance customer and employee search experiences, keep mission-critical applications running smoothly, and protect against cyber threats. Delivered wherever data lives, in one cloud, across multiple clouds, or on-premise, Elastic enables 18,000+ customers and more than half of the Fortune 500, to achieve new levels of success at scale and on a single platform.
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CLOUD SECURITY
Wolters Kluwer | September 30, 2022
Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting announced that its innovative TeamMate+ suite of cloud-based expert audit solutions was recognized by the Business Intelligence Group as a global leader in cloud computing and awarded the 2022 Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing in their annual business award program. TeamMate+ was recognized as a global leader in the Software as a Service category. Through these awards, the Business Intelligence Group sought to identify the companies, products and people that are offering unique solutions and technology that will continue to lead the industry.
“We are honored to be recognized by the Business Intelligence Group for our part in the evolution of cloud solutions for the internal audit profession, TeamMate continues to help organizations redefine their risk assessment methodology to ensure they stay ahead of risk while optimizing human resources and adhering to professional standards.”
Frans Klaassen, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Wolters Kluwer TeamMate
TeamMate+ supports all phases of audit work, from overarching audit plans aligned with organizational objectives to individual project planning, which guides day-to-day work. It enhances workflow using request and tracking features to ensure appropriate data is provided and captured within the tool during audit execution. And provides reporting capabilities that allow audit teams to craft output appropriate to various audiences including audit management and stakeholders. In addition, the TeamCloud hosting provides a secure and stable environment to access a customizable TeamMate environment from the web.
Earlier this year, TeamMate achieved authorization status from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) for the TeamMate+ FedRAMP cloud hosting environment. Achieving authorization means that auditors within US Federal agencies can create, manage, and execute audits all while staying aligned with the Red and Yellow Book standards.
“Wolters Kluwer is at the forefront of the cloud helping to drive practical innovations in the cloud,” said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer of Business Intelligence Group. “The cloud is now part of the fabric of our society, and we are thrilled that our volunteer judges were able to help promote all of these innovative services, organizations and executives.”
About Business Intelligence Group
The Business Intelligence Group was founded with the mission of recognizing true talent and superior performance in the business world. Unlike other industry and business award programs, business executives—those with experience and knowledgejudge the programs. The organization’s proprietary and unique scoring system selectively measures performance across multiple business domains and then rewards those companies whose achievements stand above those of their peers.
About Wolters Kluwer
Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with advanced technology and services.
Wolters Kluwer reported 2021 annual revenues of €4.8 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,800 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.
Wolters Kluwer shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam (WKL) and are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices. Wolters Kluwer has a sponsored Level 1 American Depositary Receipt (ADR) program. The ADRs are traded on the over-the-counter market in the U.S. (WTKWY).
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