source from：WSJ
TECH
Alibaba Cloud Hires Microsoft Veteran
The demand for cloud-based services in China is projected to reach 20 billion dollars by 2020

By ALYSSA ABKOWITZ
July 6, 2016 5:37 a.m. ET
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BEIJING—Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s cloud-computing unit is beefing up its big data and artificial intelligence capabilities, trying to gain scale in a fast-growing market.


As part of that push, Alibaba Cloud has hired Zhou Jingren, a veteran from Microsoft Corp. who worked on the Bing search infrastructure team and big data unit, as its chief scientist. Mr. Zhou will lead AliCloud’s big data and artificial intelligence research teams in Hangzhou, Beijing and Seattle, developing platforms to help business customers analyze big data.


AliCloud, which now has 500,000 paying customers for its storage, security, database management and other cloud-computing services, is looking to expand its user base and offerings. The demand for cloud-based services is expanding rapidly in China and is projected to reach 20 billion dollars by 2020, from 1.5 billion dollars in 2013, according to management consulting firm Bain & Company.


Globally, AliCloud is competing with the much-larger Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. While AliCloud’s valuation of 39 billion dollars pales in comparison to Amazon’s 91 billion dollars, Morgan Stanley, in a recent research note, said that AliCloud could become one of Alibaba’s “most significant value drivers” by 2020. The bank estimates that AliCloud’s revenue will grow 24% in the current financial year, which ends March 2017.


One of the issues facing AliCloud is how secure its services are in a country where government power operates with few checks and hacking is rampant. Alibaba has said it doesn't share individual data, and that customers of AliCloud own their data outright, even when using the company’s platform.




Mr. Zhou said in an interview that his department will focus on helping businesses leverage and analyze their big data, in part by providing a platform that can offer customized solutions. For example, Mr. Zhou said, a company’s customer service division could use AliCloud’s tools to monitor recorded phone calls between consumers and customer service representatives to detect problems and patterns, such as whether a representative raised his voice, or if the consumer was dissatisfied with a solution.