Alibaba's Cloud Unit Brings on Microsoft Veteran to Lead Big Data Team
Alibaba’s cloud computing unit has hired Microsoft veteran Jingren Zhou to lead its big data and artificial intelligence research teams, who develop platforms to help customers analyze big data, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
While at Microsoft, Zhou worked on the Bing search infrastructure team and big data unit as its chief scientist. At AliCloud, he will lead teams in Hangzhou, Beijing, and Seattle, according to the report.
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AliCloud now has 500,000 paying customers for its cloud services, which is expected to grow with the demand for cloud services in China. China’s cloud computing market will reach $20 billion by 2020, up from $1.5 billion in 2013, according to Bain & Company.
According to the WSJ, while AliCloud’s valuation of $39 billion is less than half of Amazon’s at $91 billion, Morgan Stanley said that AliCloud could become one of Alibaba’s most significant value drivers by 2020, with its revenue expected to grow 24 percent by March 2017.
Last summer, Simon Hu, the president of AliCloud said that its goal was to overtake Amazon in four years, “whether that’s in customers, technology, or worldwide scale.”
In May, Alibaba partnered with Japanese telecom SoftBank to launch cloud computing services in Japan based on AliCloud.
Source: TheWHIR