 Silicon Angle Media presents The Cube. Covering Alibaba Cloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle. I'm the based in the United States in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California. I'm also co-host of The Cube. We go out to the events and extract the signals from the noise. We're here in China. We are here with the business development director of America's for Alibaba Cloud International, Karen Liu. Thanks for taking the time. Sure, absolutely. So it's exciting for us from the US to come to China to hear the Alibaba Cloud story, but I'm blown away by the culture. It's not a B2B tech conference. It's not boring. It's exciting. Talk about the Alibaba Cloud. What's so special about Alibaba Cloud? Sure, Alibaba Cloud is actually the incumbent cloud provider in China. And furthermore, actually, we extend our reach into global market since two years ago. And our strategy for globalize our cloud services is really to bridge up the business communities from overseas to China, from US to China, from US to Asia Pacific, and to connect to the rest of the world as well. So our goal is set up the platform to enable our enterprise customers, our SME, small and medium. And we can utilize that to develop their applications, their vertical solutions to benefit their end users. Alibaba Cloud has become such a long way since 2009. So much has happened. Alibaba Group as a company is not just e-commerce. It's intersecting e-commerce, entertainment and web services, which is the magical form that consumers want. They don't want just a business solution or just do e-commerce. You guys have weaved that formula together. What's special about that formula and why is Alibaba important to the folks in the United States? I think it's all about the ecosystem and what makes the people, the people's community and business community benefit from the services we provided to the world, right? Not just the e-commerce platform we have been running for the past 18 years, but also the entertaining, the map services, location services. The data services like Alibaba Cloud is providing and being able to put all those elements together and benefit people's lives and help to improve users' experience from globally. It's been impressive here in China. Now as you go outside of China in the globalization plan, what's the strategy? What's the tactics? What are you going to do? I think our value is to, as I mentioned earlier, bridge out the business communities, especially to enable the outside world benefit the huge market from mainland China and the rest of the world as well. So I think our key value is to enable the business communities and be able to help them reach out outside the world. And that being said, actually, one of our key globalization strategy is to be able to help SMEs, small and medium companies to benefit the new technologies to the level that they won't be able to get in the past. What's the old technologies? What's some of the statistics or facts, fun facts or Alibaba stats in the US and North America? Your presence there, can you share what the current situation is? Sure. I think things about two years ago when we extend our reach into the US market, we now have more than 2,000 customers from individual to startup, to medium enterprises and to some very large enterprises in the world as well. So people from the communities get to know Alibaba Cloud and get to know Alibaba, not only provide to the e-commerce services, the EWTP platform to the world, we also provide the data technologies, we also provide the technologies to the world that benefit their reach to the world. Everyone talks about data driven, you guys have a very specific data formula, data fueling, not just getting the data from engagement data and user data, but fueling that data in for a user experience. So the question is, as you go outside of China into the US, certainly you have a developer ecosystem, you have a business ecosystem, how do the folks benefit locally in the US? So business, do they have access to China? Is it the services? Is it the technology? Can you share the benefits to the developers and to the businesses? Sure, absolutely. We ran a program called China Connect and that's the program we help the business communities in the US from the ISVs, the independent software vendors from the SaaS providers and developers of communities to be able to develop their applications and software and bring those benefits to China market. And through this process, it's hard to navigate a brand new market, especially in China, without knowing the people, the communities, the culture, the business practices here, right? So we actually provide a platform, a program to help them to get to know the market and help them to lend their business in China through this program and help them of course, expertise their business goals in China. A lot of people want to know what's inside their cloud, it's one of those things where, this mysterious cloud and security is a concern, but partnerships are critical. Talk about what's inside your cloud. Intel's a big partner. What's the Alibaba Intel partnership like? It's a fantastic partnership. We have been established over the past few years and actually Intel is one of our strategic lines in the marketplace. They provide us a lot of from hardware to technology in terms of helping us to establish the platform with the business communities, not only in China, but globally. So we really appreciate Intel's partnership. And moving forward, we're looking for more reciprocal partnership with Intel to be able to form more strategic partnership, to be able to benefit the business communities and people's communities as well. For the folks in the US, I'll say that this is an amazing conference. It's got a million people here. I don't even know the numbers. I'm sure you have the numbers handy, but it's a mix of developers. You have a crowded house here with developers, but you also have some business people. You have key partners. I saw some US companies here. What's the vibe at the event? What's the feeling here? You got a music festival three nights. It's not a boring tech conference. Is that by design? Share the stats. How many people are here? I guess this is the excitement of this conference annually. We actually invite a lot of our customers from US and the rest of the world to join us to share the excitement from China, to share the experience from Alibaba. Just like Jack said, the vision for us is to make people's lives more healthier and happier. The two age strategy from us, it's not just the hardworking, it's also the fun. It's also the excitement for us to share this technology, to share this platform, to enable people to enjoy this technology. The scene I see here, it's interesting. I've seen it Apple in the late 90s when Steve Jobs transformed that company. He had the vision of technology, meaning liberal arts, that became kind of their calling card. You guys have art and science coming together. It's not just scientists and developers. You have artists here, because user experience is super important. Exactly. Is that part of the culture as science and arts comes together? Because Jack is a charismatic leader. He's a cult of personality. Young company. It is. Share the culture. It is. So just like Jack and other executives has been sharing with the community, we want to make sure technology is inclusive elements to everyone in the community, not just for the programmers or developers or the very high-tech companies. It should benefit the entire society. And fun, of course, always as part of it, to make people's life happier and to make users experience more satisfied. You've had a career in international technology industry for a while. You've seen how it's played out in the past. We're in a different world now. It's a global world. The internet has opened up a lot of good things and sometimes not so bad good things. In the US, obviously election and fake news. But as the culture starts connecting, a new kind of normal is evolving. How does Alibaba see themselves in this new world order? I think we see ourselves as an enabler and platform to bring the technology and bring the people and bring the happiness together to benefit everyone in the world, not just the tech sectors or just the e-commerce sectors or just one of the single verticals. We are trying to bring the technologies and the enablement, the platform that everybody can enjoy. That's the core value for us as the inclusive, inclusive technology provider. For the folks in the United States that will see this video, share something that they may not know about Alibaba. That'd be the first time they're getting to see some of the culture and some of the commentary. What should they know about Alibaba as you guys move and become global? They're going to see some services. Is it the services, is it the people with culture? What should they engage with Alibaba Cloud? How should they see Alibaba Cloud? First of all, we are one of the top three cloud providers in the world. If you look at the latest, the government magic country released a couple of weeks ago and that's why globalization is critical for us and we want to be able to reach out to the overseas communities and we want to build up the trust and the confidence with the local business communities like the Raging, we're in the US market for instance. So for us, become the global family is critical for us and this is our vision to bring the values to them as well. That's fantastic. It's a spectacular culture and the ecosystem is just now growing. Open source software is growing exponentially. Global fabric community is developing and there's opportunities for US companies and developers to access China. Talk a little bit more about the potential that entrepreneurs and businesses can have in this global framework. Sure, the beauty of cloud is actually the ecosystem. It's not just one company or one vertical. And for us, for instance, we try to enable the small business especially those startup business by offering them the free resources from our infrastructure at global level. Be able to enable those young people especially to create their own ideas to be innovative and to utilize our resources. Be able to access the technologies like the way the big companies has been invested into. So this is I think as an example for us to commit to this global market. I think for us actually to be part of that family especially in Silicon Valley is critical because of the technologies, because of innovations and because of the mindset in Silicon Valley. So that's why we set up our R&D centers. We set up our front end back office in Silicon Valley as well. Being able to be part of that region and not only to learn the technologies but sense the mindset in that region. I think it's critical for us as well as a Chinese headquartered company but with a global mission. And where in Silicon Valley is your office? We are headquartered in San Mateo, California for US operation. And entrepreneurship is changing in this global. It's exciting. What's the benefit to entrepreneurs? And certainly venture capitalists are highly interested in the China market. They've been in here for a while. Is it coming together? Yes, it is indeed. Actually, not only we funding a lot of the new tech companies, we also being able to help them to find their partners to build up an extended ecosystem in Silicon Valley, in West Coast regions as well as extended from the inner US in Midwest region, Chicago for instance, to New York, Boston areas as well. I noticed on the sponsorship list and partner list in your ecosystem, a logo that is new but is super important in the US is growing like crazy. The cloud native compute foundation is here. And that's the Linux foundation. They're partnering with you. The cloud native developer market is evolving very, very quickly. They're different than the old classic IT developers. And new generations, not IT anymore, it's data is driving it and it's open source. But how do you guys engage with that community? Because clearly, they win with it. Yes, we're actually working with a lot of open source partners like Docker, SAP Pana One and others being able to help them to bring the communities and bring their customers onto our infrastructures and create this kind of platform to help the developer communities to develop their applications. So it's a lot of vertical focus, the solution development paths right now. It's interesting, you mentioned small, you mentioned small, medium-sized enterprises and businesses, but the big enterprises are transforming as well. How did you see Alaba helping them because they're going cloud native, they're going private cloud on premise. You have quantum computing, you have IoT, you have a lot of things. How's the digital transformation message for enterprises and for small businesses don't want to pay the technology tax? I think for large enterprises, the most strategy we have been seeing from the marketplace, one is multi-cloud strategy. People need redundancy. People want to reduce the dependencies for one or two cloud providers. And we work with the other cloud providers in the community to provide interoperabilities to support these multi-cloud strategies. On the other side, a couple of years back, people didn't know what's in the cloud, right? And then people rushed to cloud for everything and now people come back and review the strategies and find out hybrid cloud strategy is more suitable for large enterprises. They have their on-prem architect and infrastructure. Meanwhile, they move some of their applications to cloud. So it's a good combination of on-prem physical infrastructure cloud topology. So we have been seeing the trends for large enterprise clients. For small business, especially for small business, they don't have the upfront huge investment into the infrastructure and we provide them the instant access to the infrastructure, not only from computing, storage, network and the database perspective will put more importantly from security perspective. The Alibaba infrastructure services, I saw part of the display here, very prominent in that equation. You guys have the scale. What can you share about the under the hood? What's the technology look like? What's the engine of Alibaba cloud? How mature is it? What's to do? Where's the strategic direction? Say blockchain is important, but now that's changing everything. So there's all these new waves coming. Yes, just like a Gartner Magic Pong Tree indicated two months ago, if you look at the overall qualifications to be a world lead cloud provider, world number four, after AWS, Microsoft, Azure and Google Cloud. But if you look at market share and revenue, world number three. So that being said, we actually provide a very comprehensive technology and the infrastructure to the business communities and people's communities. For instance, from the global footprint perspective, right now we have 14 regions pretty much covered all the major market in the world. And by the end of this year into the beginning of next year, we're going to activate another two to three regions, make it 16 to 17 regions globally and then we can offer the global cloud solutions for the big and small businesses. That's exciting. And Silicon Valley is certainly important, our home base. Are you guys hiring? Is there expanding share a little bit of a public service announcement on what's going on in the Silicon Valley area? You guys hiring, looking for engineers? What kind of people are you looking for? Yes, great question actually. We are hiring and we're looking for talented professionals. Join us from those marketing business development to cloud architect to technical cloud management to marketing for instance. So we want to build up a business that we can truly build up the trust with the local business communities. That's why we hire a lot of local talented young professionals and they help them to be able to fit into the culture, very unique culture of Alibaba and also be able to contribute to this journey, very exciting journey. China has always been big. Everyone in the United States knows the numbers are big here in terms of mobile deployment, I mean app size. So a lot of people in the US look at China and say, wow, we can collaborate with China. It's a very nice distribution system but they got to take care of their needs at home. Exactly. This is a big part of the undercurrent we're hearing. How do you guys help? Well, globalization is always critical for any business, right? Even for some small business, just like Jack Ma said this morning at his speech, even for small business, they need to globalize, they need to reach out to more business communities and more customers. So for us actually, we, because of the huge market in China, because of the AWTP platform we set up globally, because Alibaba cloud infrastructure and our global footprint, we actually be able to help our customers not only access infrastructure from a cloud perspective, but also help them to leverage our ecosystem from different business units and our partnership to be able to help them to expedite their business in China and globally. That's exciting. And finally, developers are a big hot button. Everyone always says, I hear comments like, we have to own the developer community. Not that you could own the developer, or no one wants to be owned, but what they mean is they want to win over the hearts and minds of developers. A lot of competition, and developers want programmable infrastructure. In DevOps world, that's called DevOps. That is really the new normal in developer community. How do you guys attack that developer market? We actually want to enable the developers community, not home or just win over. We want constantly enable them with the new platform, the new business models, the new programs that we can bring them together. So that's our mission, enablement. Congratulations on a spectacular formula. Thank you. And thanks for having us here at theCUBE and SiliconANGLE, and thanks for your time. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Karen Lu here in China, with theCUBE exclusive coverage in China, bringing the stories of the most important trends in tech and Alibaba cloud, really changing the game with their formula of e-commerce, entertainment and entertainment. This is not B2B boring to boring, exciting music festival. 60,000 people are here at this conference, developers in the world watching. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. Thanks for watching.