Alibaba Recruited By Asia’s Top Oil Co For Big Data Services

Since Alibaba’s massive debut as an eCommerce platform through a $25 billion IPO, the company has spun a web of various ventures, both B2B and B2C, from payments technology to personal finance to, most recently, “smart living.”

Alibaba revealed earlier this month that the company is planning a new division to utilize Big Data and the Internet of Things by providing product makers with a way to add Internet capability to their items. At present, Alibaba is China’s largest cloud services provider, reports said, with nearly a quarter of the market.

The Chinese corporation’s Big Data ventures have now caught the attention of Asia’s largest oil refiner, Sinopec. According to reports last Friday (April 17), Sinopec has chosen Alibaba to supply cloud computing services and Big Data analytics. The companies declined to specify any financial details of the partnership, but noted that there is no equity cooperation involved in the deal.

“By helping Sinopec with digitization and big data technologies, we hope we can play a part to help bring about greener solutions and new business opportunities,” said Allen Zhang, who heads Alibaba’s cloud computing unit Aliyun. According to Sinopec, Alibaba will be helping to upgrade the oil firm’s petrochemical services throughout the production.

Sinopec is one Chinese state-owned entity that has been encouraged by the government to adopt more technologically advanced tools that utilize cloud computing and data analytics to streamline supply chain management and environmental factors, such as emissions, reports said.

Sinopec and Alibaba are also reportedly discussing further partnerships involving the Internet of Things, eCommerce, eFinance, and ePayments.

While Alibaba is the undisputed champion of cloud computing in the nation, helping it to snag a client so large as Sinopec, the region’s small- and medium-sized businesses are only just beginning to catch on to the benefits of cloud SaaS. According to a recent survey by the Asian Cloud Computing Association, SMEs in the Asia Pacific region increased their spending on cloud computing services by 42 percent in 2014, through with still just $2 billion being spent on the technology, have a long way to go to integrate the cloud into everyday operations.