Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms Q4 2024 report. The designation acknowledges Alibaba Cloud’s depth of cloud and AI offerings, its significant global presence, and its ability to provide a wide range of products and services. This is the first time Alibaba Cloud has been recognized as a Leader among other significant public cloud platform providers in this report. The report highlights Alibaba Cloud’s capacity for AI innovation, homegrown AI models, breadth of foundation model choices, and model-as-a-service (MaaS) innovation. The core infrastructure and model-as-a-service capabilities enable Alibaba Cloud to provide a major model repository for AI across China.
“Alibaba has upped the ante on serverless beyond AI, packaging its powerful cloud-native infrastructure into more accessible offerings for both developers and operators, with data and analytics as a standout,” said Forrester in the report. “Alibaba is a good fit for Chinese-based enterprises or international corporations requiring cloud scale across APAC and parts of Africa, Europe, and Latin America,” the report added.
The Forrester report is a 30-criterion evaluation of the nine most significant public cloud platform providers. Each provider is evaluated based on the strengths of their current offerings, strategy, and market presence. Alibaba Cloud has achieved the highest possible assessment score (5.0 out of 5.0) in 17 criteria, including database, data integration, governance services, container and Kubernetes services, serverless/FaaS services, compute, IoT, storage services, and AI development services.
“Expanding our cloud-native infrastructure and AI capabilities in the public cloud space to better support our clients is a top priority. We are honored to be recognized by Forrester for our efforts in this critical area,” said Jingren Zhou, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “To address the increasing demands of AI, we are dedicated to continuously enhancing our ability to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable cloud products and AI applications to our customers.”
At Apsara Conference 2024, Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship event hosted in September, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a revamped full-stack infrastructure designed to meet the growing demands for robust AI computing. It also released over 100 of its newly launched large language models, Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community. Qwen, Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large language model, has seen significant adoption since its introduction in April 2023. The Qwen models have been downloaded over 40 million times on open-source platforms such as Hugging Face and ModelScope and have inspired the creation of more than 78,000 derivative models.
As a MaaS concept creator and an open-source advocate, Alibaba Cloud also built ModelScope, China’s most prominent AI model community. It hosts over 10,000 models and serves more than 8 million developers.
Regarding its global presence, Alibaba Cloud continues expanding its international reach, operating 85 data centers in 28 regions globally. In May 2024, Alibaba Cloud announced its plan to launch its first cloud region in Mexico and to establish additional data centers in its key markets, including Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea, in the next three years.
