Alibaba Cloud named leader in Forrester Wave Q4 2024

Alibaba Cloud has been recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms Q4 2024 report.

This marks the first such recognition for Alibaba Cloud among significant public cloud platform providers assessed in the report. Alibaba Cloud was positioned as one of four leaders out of nine global vendors evaluated, achieving the second highest scores in both current offering and strategy categories. The report commended Alibaba Cloud's innovation in artificial intelligence, highlighting its development of homegrown AI models and the breadth of model-as-a-service (MaaS) innovations. Additionally, Forrester noted that these capabilities enable Alibaba Cloud to serve as a central model repository for AI in China.

Forrester's report emphasises Alibaba's enhancement of serverless capabilities beyond AI, making its cloud-native infrastructure more accessible. This makes Alibaba a suitable option for enterprises based in China or international corporations needing cloud scale across the Asia Pacific, parts of Africa, Europe, and Latin America. The report's evaluation criteria included current offerings, strategy, and market presence, with Alibaba Cloud achieving a perfect score in 17 areas including database services, data integration, governance services, and AI development services.

Jingren Zhou, Chief Technology Officer of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, expressed satisfaction with the recognition. "Expanding our cloud-native infrastructure and AI capabilities in the public cloud space to better support our clients is a top priority. We are honoured to be recognised by Forrester for our efforts in this critical area. To address the increasing demands of AI, we are dedicated to continuously enhancing our ability to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable cloud products and AI applications to our customers," he stated.

At the recent Apsara Conference 2024, Alibaba Cloud introduced a restructured full-stack infrastructure to meet the increasing demand for AI computing. The company also released over 100 newly-launched large language models, including Qwen 2.5, to the global open-source community. Since its launch in April 2023, the Qwen model has been downloaded over 40 million times and has led to the creation of more than 78,000 derivative models.

Alibaba Cloud's ModelScope, identified as China's largest AI model community, hosts over 10,000 models and serves more than 8 million developers. Alibaba Cloud has been active in expanding its global reach, operating 85 data centres across 28 regions globally. In May 2024, the company announced plans to establish its first cloud region in Mexico and additional data centres in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea within the next three years.