Alibaba launches big data cloud platform in China
The Alibaba Group is launching a "big data" cloud platform which it plans will make data asset technology widely available throughout China.
Alibaba Cloud Computing (AliCloud), said on Thursday that the cloud "Big Data Platform" would offer an initial 20 products or solutions and services, which would cover all aspects of the so-called data development chain. This includes data services and visualization products that assist with data processing and analysis, but also provide a compute engine with capabilities for machine learning.
In technology, Big Data refers to extremely large or complex data sets of structured and unstructured information that is produced as a by-product of a companies operations, and can include data as diverse, as text messages, video clips, photographs, web site comments as well as tradition SQL structured data from databases. Big data can be stored in No-SQL (not-only SQL) style data repositories in private or public clouds and be analyzed with high-performance computers to spot patterns, trend and associations.
"The Big Data Platform fulfills our vision of sharing our vast data troves that will create immense value to our users", AliCloud president Simon Hu said at the launch in Shanghai.
"What we want to do at Alibaba is turn the data-processing capacity and data-security capabilities that we’ve accumulated over the last decade into a product, so that data becomes a resource and a service that we can provide our clients".
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