Aliyun's cloud to boost entrepreneurs

A view of the booth of Aliyun at an exhibition in Shenzhen, South Chian's Guangdong province, July 16, 2016. [Photo/IC]

Aliyun, the cloud computing brand of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, announced further moves within two years to help startups in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin with cloud computing services.

It will provide cloud services for 600 technological innovation-based enterprises and help them access the internet. This will help them reduce entrepreneurial costs and enhance efficiency, according to the agreements signed by Aliyun and the management committee of Tianjin Binhai New Area's central business district.

Technical and financial support will be given to these startups. Moreover, Aliyun will cooperate with leading universities in Tianjin to set up courses related to cloud computing and data science and to train skilled workers.

"Obviously, the government has offered a solid foundation for startups, but what's more important are soft skills, which Aliyun will focus on," said Liu Song, general manager of Alibaba Group's Ecosystem.

"Startups have a worldwide problem, that is, their three to five percent survival rate," he said, "what we will do is to give each incubator a professional entrepreneurial environment."

"Entrepreneurs will benefit from Alibaba's global scale and have access to Alibaba's online retail platform Tmall.com," he further explained.

UrWork, a co-working office space owned by Mao Daqing, Vanke Group's former vice-president, will cooperate with Aliyun to provide places for these startups, which are expected to start trial operation in early September.

This is not Aliyun's first move to expand its cloud services in Tianjin. The firm signed a contract with the government to open one of its own incubators in Tianjin in July of last year, according to local media.

Aliyun has established strategic cooperative partnerships with tech giants. It has worked with smartphone maker HTC Corp, IT service provider Digital China Holdings Ltd and global audit and advisory firm Deloitte to promote the development of its cloud business.

According to the consultancy Gartner Inc, the worldwide cloud services market is projected to grow 16.5 percent in 2016 to total $204 billion, up from $175 billion in 2015.

Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc, told China Daily: "Startups and small and medium-sized companies are key areas for adopting public cloud services. Although their sizes are relatively small, some of them have significant growth potential."

Liu Jing contributed to this story.