Alibaba’s cloud arm helps etailer reach $38 bn during Singles’ Day sale

Hangzhou, China-based Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, reported $38.4 billion gross merchandise volume (GMV) during the 24-hour shopping spree during the Singles’ Day on 11 November.

 The company clocked peak order rate of 544,000/sec, which it claims is 1360 times that of the inaugural edition in 2009.

The e-commerce giant attributes the sale’s success to its technology platforms, particularly cloud computing arm.

The 11.11 global shopping festival set records by hosting 100% of Alibaba Group’s core systems on its cloud platform, it said in a statement.

Cloud computing company Alibaba Cloud, also known as Aliyun, is a unit of Alibaba Group and provides cloud computing services to online businesses and Alibaba's own e-commerce ecosystem.

The company came out with some of the key technologies that supported its event which included X-Dragon server, OceanBase and POLARDB databases, separation between storage and compute, DMA network and Apsara operating system.

The technologies used during the sale are available to all Alibaba cloud customers, the company said. 

Last year in August, Alibaba had launched nine global cloud products aimed particularly at the retail sector in the Aisa-Pacific-of which India forms a significant part

Alibaba Cloud recently unveiled more than 10 products and features that had only been available in China such as the PolarDB database and Alibaba Log Service, in May this year.  It also launched seven new solutions and two new features for the international market at the 2019 World Mobile Congress in February.

Alibaba Cloud also showed strong quarterly performance. The etailer said its cloud computing revenue grew 64% year-on-year to reach about $1.3 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2019. Alibaba claims that as of August 2019, around 59% of all companies listed in China were using its services.

Global cloud business is dominated by three key players -- Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Other companies in the space include IBM, Oracle, CenturyLink, VMware.