Alibaba Cloud Sees 50% Increase in Demand for Cloud Technologies During Circuit Breaker Period

More Singapore SMEs embracing Cloud technologies to weather COVID-19 impacts

Singapore, 24 August, 2020 – More businesses in Singapore, especially Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are turning to Cloud-based technologies as a result of COVID-19 Circuit Break measures, based on demand received by Alibaba Cloud. The more than 50% surge in demand reflects the pressing need for businesses to embrace technologies for continued operation, when the city’s general mobility came to a standstill during the lockdown.

Since January this year, Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has partnered with a range of companies including SMEs from various industries such as design, technology, digital infrastructure, delivery, online education, food and beverage (F&B), hospitality and real estate, to expedite their digitalization capabilities and migrate their offline businesses rapidly to an online platform. The fast and simple deployment solutions meant companies can start running their operations on cloud in under 48 hours, drastically increasing their business resilience throughout the pandemic.

“Alibaba decided to go all-in with technology during the 2003 SARS epidemic, back when we were still a SME and on the verge of launching our Taobao e-commerce platform. When COVID-19 stuck, we feel the struggle and the pain faced by Singaporean local companies. We therefore want to share our know-knows and expertise with local enterprises, helping them to go through the transformation process,” said Derek Wang, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Singapore. “We believe with our ecosystem expertise from serving global customers, we can help Singaporean enterprises to seize the digitalization opportunity out of the current crisis, and together we will help our economy to bounce back from the recession.”

Guaranteeing Vital Delivery Services

Food and goods delivery services have become the bloodline for Singaporeans stranded at home during COVID-19. RedMart, Singapore’s leading online supermarket under Alibaba subsidiary Lazada, performed an extremely critical role to ensure Singaporeans’ daily needs are fulfilled. Running on Alibaba Cloud’s digital infrastructure, using products such as database and ECS (Elastic Compute Service), RedMart successfully maintained one of the industry’s best delivery record and customer satisfaction score despite the spike in demand for grocery deliveries. With Alibaba Cloud’s mature ecosystem offering, it provided RedMart the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO), which enables RedMart to use more advanced solutions to build a cloud-native architecture to virtualize, store, network and secure their infrastructure without passing on the cost to consumers while increased their efficiency.

"Alibaba Cloud has helped RedMart manage our software applications in a flexible, reliable, and cost-effective manner. Alibaba Cloud has played a pivotal role in helping us convince customers about our customer focus and commitment to be more reliable and responsive," said Ashish Awasthi, Executive Vice President of RedMart.

Ensuring Business Continuity

Heartland retailers have been severely affected especially during the Circuit Breaker period, given their heavy reliance on human traffic for business. In order to help them to reach customers online and go digital quickly in a cost-effective manner, Alibaba Cloud partnered with SCash to implement cloud computing solutions for a range of heartland businesses including traditional Chinese medicine halls, provision and convenience shops, fashion outlets, and F&B stalls including a chicken rice and a bak kut the shop. By deploying cloud-based technologies, these stalls are able to transform their brick-and-mortar operation to an omnichannel one, which enables them to reach out to customers stuck at home. To date, more than 170 heartland enterprises have signed up for the Alibaba Cloud-SCash initiative for rapid digital transformation.

“Our partnership with Alibaba Cloud will provide our customers with much needed infrastructure, skills and cost-effectiveness to go digital, and this will help them greatly in ensuring business continuity during the lockdown,” said Michael Lee, Chief Executive Officer, SCash.

Supporting Employees’ Well-being

Alibaba Cloud has partnered with JET Workflow to help SPACElogic, a specialist in commercial interior and permanent gallery and museum fit-out projects, to provide smart measures for employees coming into the office. Using a customised application developed for the company, SPACElogic staff could conduct self-check-in and temperature monitoring from their personal smart devices without needing additional hardware. The simple yet effective set up worked well for the company during the pandemic to monitor their staff’s health status.

“Our workers are our greatest asset; therefore, we are very pleased to work with Alibaba Cloud to use technology to help ensure their safety at the workplace. With proper measures in place, we can keep an eye on workers’ well-being while carrying out business activities as usual and ensuring timely delivery of projects to our customers,” said Roland Ang, Regional Director of Strategy and Development, SPACElogic.

Enabling Remote Education

As more students turn to online learning during the pandemic, BambooCloud, an online learning technology and platform solution provider, had to contend with a sudden increase in online traffic volumes during the pandemic, and the pressure exerted on the company’s existing digital infrastructure. In order to deliver a smooth online experience for students, BambooCloud deployed Alibaba Cloud’s services to manage the surging demand. The elastic, scalable and flexible infrastructure ensured a smooth and seamless learning experience, while being cost-effective and easy to deploy.

“We believe online learning is the future of education. Therefore, by equipping ourselves with the reliable technology infrastructure provided by Alibaba Cloud, we are able to expand our business to serve more customers on demand especially during COVID-19,” said Yu Hao, Chief Executive Officer of BambooCloud.

Despite the unprecedented impact caused by COVID-19 on the economy and businesses here, Singapore SMEs continue to demonstrate their resilience and willingness to embrace cloud computing technologies. As the largest public cloud computing company in Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud is committed to helping Singaporeans enterprises to transform digitally to achieve business success during the pandemic and in the near future.

About Alibaba Cloud

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (alibabacloud.com), the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, is among the world’s top three IaaS providers, according to Gartner. It is also the largest provider of public cloud services in China, according to IDC. Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to businesses worldwide, including merchants doing business on Alibaba Group marketplaces, start-ups, corporations and public services. Alibaba Cloud is the official Cloud Services Partner of the International Olympic Committee.