Introduction

Executives across industries recognize their organizations' need for digital transformation and the accompanying priority to become insights-driven. They must understand customers to serve them better and decipher operations to improve them. These two tasks require insights. They must systematically harness data and apply the insights derived from it to create differentiated experiences and competitive advantages. In a recent survey, a whopping 90% of global data and analytics decision-makers told Forrester, “Better use of data insights in business decision-making would be a priority for their firm over the next 12 months.”

Alibaba Cloud in the Report

Alibaba Cloud takes a product-first, services-second approach. In 2015, China's largest public cloud provider decided to commercialize the insights services it had developed internally to improve the Alibaba Group's e-commerce business. The venture began by focusing on city management use cases, training technologists to have a business-first mindset, and attracting partners with digital transformation capabilities. Today, Alibaba Cloud is expanding its core platform, ET Brain, with vertical and domain applications that include configurable algorithms, dashboards, and decision-support tools. These solutions ingest various types of data, often from sensors, provided primarily by clients. Alibaba has a limited set of data partners and has not developed proprietary data sets. Insights are delivered via its DataV and QuickBI tools, which include configurable reports and dashboards. AI is central to Alibaba's product road map, with a team dedicated to developing new AI algorithms and embedding emerging technologies, such as computer vision or facial recognition, in applications. Finally, Alibaba Cloud's insights services are slowly expanding outside of its traditional Asian base.