Alibaba’s cloud computing arm this week launched its second data center in Indonesia in response to surging customer demand.
In a statement, Alibaba Cloud said having two centers in the market will offer stronger disaster-recovery capabilities, given that customers can deploy mission-critical workloads in multiple availability zones and easily switch over within seconds.
Alibaba Cloud breaks its global coverage into regions, with availability zones spread out within them. Each availability zone has one or more data centers. It now has 55 availability zones across 19 regions worldwide.
The two data centers will offer a suite of services, including elastic computing, database services, networking, storage, security and middleware, as well as solutions that address vertical industry challenges. The demand is particularly strong for big data and analytic solutions among Indonesian firms, Alibaba Cloud said.
Following its launch of Machine Learning for AI,a suite of services from data processing, model training to model evaluation,Alibaba Cloud plans to roll out later this month new real-time search, data analysis and visualization features.
“With better connectivity and a fast-growing digital community, the Indonesian market presents enormous opportunities to both local and global enterprises,“said Leon Chen, general manager of Singapore and Indonesia at Alibaba Cloud.
“By doubling our data-center capacity and launching the Internet Champion Global Accelerator Program in Indonesia, we aim to further build the cloud ecosystem and talent pool for Indonesia,“he added.
The program offers training, mentorship and venture capital opportunities to companies and individuals, as the Indonesia government seeks to create 1,000 viable start-ups worth US$10 billion by 2020.
Although its tech sector is still nascent, Southeast Asia’s largest country by population has been a prime breeding ground for start-ups such as e-commerce player Tokopedia, in which Alibaba took a minority share, when it led a funding round last August.
“The Digital Economy Vision of Indonesia sets out a clear direction for our future development. Our goal is to foster new decacorn and unicorn, accelerate the growth of at least 1,000 startups, and help at least 8 million people in the traditional farming and fishing industries, as well as SMEs, to go digital,“said Indonesian Minister of Communications and Information H.E. Rudiantara.
