Alibaba may be best known as a leader in online retail, but the company founded by Chinese mogul Jack Ma has now made a foray into offering data as a service (DaaS) solutions.
Last month, the company formally launched the Lingyang Intelligent Service Company. This business will offer data solutions originally developed for Alibaba and its subsidiaries to the corporate and industrial sectors.
Lingyang will initially offer five major cloud product lines geared towards analysis, customer service, development, marketing, production, and sales. Under these lines, the company will present eleven core products, including Bizphin, Dataphin, Operation Advisor, Quick Audience, and Quick BI.
By offering such a formidable lineup of products, several experts feel that Lingyang may find itself in a position to challenge leading players in the software as a service (SaaS) market like Dynamics, Oracle, Salesforce, and even SAP.
Alibaba’s chief technology officer Cheng Li said that, through its products, Lingyang would be a great help to enterprises in a diverse range of industries. He sees the DaaS provider assisting these firms in terms of decision making, as well as pushing their growth by way of data intelligence applied to any number of multi-platform operations.
Alibaba vice-president Peng Xinyu is set to head the new company as its chief executive officer. For his part, he wants to make it clear that Lingyang offers data solutions as opposed to software solutions that are more familiar to those in the IT industry. Indeed, through Lingyang, the Alibaba Group wants to help companies unlock maximum value through the use of data intelligence.
Currently, Alibaba already has more than 1.3 billion active users worldwide, with a great majority in China alone. The need to service these customers has led to the development of an extensive tool suite which now serves as the backbone for Lingyang.
The new company is said to have a total capitalization of around $7.5 million. It will initially be staffed by a team drawn from different units under the Alibaba Group. They have extensive experience in coding, cloud computing, databasing, and system management.
However, many industry watchers wonder how far Alibaba can spin out this new venture in light of its recent regulatory woes. The company was recently called out and penalized by the State Administration for Market Regulation in Beijing for failing to declare compliance with the Chinese government’s antitrust regulations in its most recent deals.
