Alibaba Cloud brings chatty SaaS products out of China and into more markets

Alibaba Cloud has started to expand its SaaS portfolio by bringing products it once offered only in China to other territories.

The Register has learned that the Chinese web giant recently rebranded its "Elastic Cloud Phone" as just "Cloud Phone" and made it available in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Cloud Phone makes it possible to rent virtual Android devices that run in Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba suggests they're useful for roles including testing apps, streaming games, and providing a phone that remote customer reps can use to speak to customers and access enterprise data.

The virtual droids run on Arm servers and use the Shenlong virtualization tech. Alibaba explains that Shelling sees some workloads offloaded to a dedicated chip called a Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU), which seems to have the same role as the SmartNIC or "data processing unit" used by other hyperscalers.

Cloud Phones can be accessed from clients for Windows, macOS and Android – or an Alibaba Cloud workspace.

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Another Alibaba Cloud SaaS that's been offered to more of the world is DingTalk – a Microsoft Teams-like suite of communications and collaboration apps that has already won over 700 million users worldwide, most of them consumers.

But Alibaba Cloud has increasingly targeted enterprise users. At the end of 2023 it claimed 25 million business users for the suite, spread across 120,000 clients.

DingTalk enterprise includes tools for hosting videoconferences, messaging, document creation and sharing, calendaring, and shared cloud storage. It's 2024 so of course Alibaba Cloud has added generative AI features to the suite, too.

Last week the cloudy concern promoted an "Enterprise" cut of the product to users across Southeast Asia and in Hong Kong. Alibaba Cloud told us it's "an enhanced and more specialized version of the existing DingTalk platform."

Alibaba Cloud's not explained why it brought these SaaS offering out from behind the Great Firewall, but a desire to find growth markets is the likely motivation. Alibaba Cloud recently reported seven percent year-on-year revenue growth – far slower than its Western peers – during a moment when China's economy has needed massive stimulus to keep it humming.

A useful barometer of China's economy is the November 11 Singles' Day e-commerce sales that, in years past, saw the likes of Alibaba Cloud tout the tech they use to handle huge numbers of shoppers who spend record sums during the festival of conspicuous consumption. This year, China's e-commerce titans disclosed very little about Singles' Day sales, which could indicate that records have not been smashed as hoped.

Finding new SaaS customers outside China might therefore help Alibaba to find new revenue at a time its main e-commerce offering faces difficulties – although it faces competition from established players Google and Microsoft for DingTalk, and AWS for virtual Androids. ®