The pandemic may have been a curveball for industry giants on a global scale, but the new normal also acted as a springboard for small-scale businesses and startups whose business models easily adapted with the current environment.
Most of these businesses are leveraging on digital technology and Alibaba Group’s cloud division, Alibaba Cloud, sees it as an opportunity to reach them through a hyper-localized grassroots approach and connect these brands with the company’s partners around the world.
This strategy, however, is not exclusive to the Philippines. Earlier this month, the e-commerce giant also launched two similar initiatives in Vietnam that will bolster small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and is called the “Super September 2020” project.
Although it does not have a catchy name like Vietnam’s, Alibaba Cloud’s local digital ecosystem strategy comes on the heels of the recently established Philippines Ecosystem Alliance, a plan to fortify collaboration between Philippine cloud-native businesses to Alibaba Cloud’s global partners.
The local partners for the grassroots approach include ERP and cloud software solutions provider Kaisa, software asset management (SAM) and cloud and volume licensing services provider Crayon, and IT solutions provider Microgenesis. They will work with enterprise software specialist Temenos and analytic database management software company Vertica.
Partner financial institutions will now have access to Temenos’ Alibaba Cloud certified core banking product called Temenos Transact. Meanwhile, Vertica will open its doors to intelligence-driven businesses with its new analytics platform, a service used primarily by organizations with demanding analytical workloads.
According to Lancelot Guo, president of ecosystem and sales operations for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, more and more businesses are starting to see the digitalization journey as a necessity, rather than a simple advantage.
“A successful adoption of cloud is only possible when the ecosystem is brought together to support customers’ needs. Therefore, we want to work with world class partners such as Temenos and Vertica in the transformation process, leveraging their expertise to help our customers grow.”
By 2023, Alibaba Cloud aims to support 5,000 businesses with their respective digital migrations, and in the next three years train 50,000 IT professionals. Currently, the cloud computing company has ties with local retail, fintech, media, information communications technology (ICT), business process outsourcing (BPO), healthcare, and education industries.
