SINGAPORE: Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, has launched nine new products to help retailers in Southeast Asia to digitise their operations and embrace Alibaba’s “new retail” concept.

This initiative has already taken off in China where the company aims to integrate online and offline shopping that is supported by data analysis, smart logistics and marketing in order to improve customer experiences.

Alibaba is keen to extend the concept across Southeast Asia, a market of roughly 550 million people, and its latest suite of omnichannel solutions cover areas such as cloud architecture, machine learning and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Hangzhou-based company unveiled the new offerings at a summit in Singapore, while providing further detail in statement, in which it also announced the launch of the ASEAN Partner Alliance Programme.

This aims to recruit 150 partners and to train 600 sales and technology personnel over the next 12 months to fuel growth of the digital ecosystem in the region.

At the same event, Alibaba Cloud also announced a partnership with the National University of Singapore to push forward Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative and technology research under the innovation incubator programme.

The nine new products, previously only available in China, include, among others, an IoT platform and toolkit for the global market; an anti-bot service; Smart Access Gateway, which supports a multiple location enterprise network; an online backup service to protect critical business data; and an insights tool called Data Lake Analytics.

“Asia Pacific is a unique market, and as a global cloud services provider with an Asian origin, we are committed to leverage our knowledge and experience to build a sustainable regional ecosystem and enrich our offerings to meet the needs of our customers in this digital age,” said Derek Wang, chief solution architect at Alibaba Cloud.

“This new suite of offering includes products that are highly efficient, cost effective, and some of them are the first of their kind in the industry,” he added.

Alibaba’s latest move to extend its capabilities beyond its home market provides further evidence of its determination to win business across the region and it follows a series of recent deals to boost e-commerce.

Earlier this year, for example, the company formed a partnership with the government of Thailand to build a digital trading hub in the country, following a similar initiative in Malaysia last year, while at the same time it has been busy expanding its stake in Lazada, one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia.

Sourced from Alibaba; additional content by WARC staff