While Alibaba Cloud maintains its public cloud hold in the Chinese market, the cloud provider is making moves to expand its presence across Southeast Asia. Yesterday at the Alibaba Cloud Summit Infinity 2018 in Singapore — its first cloud computing conference outside of China — the company launched nine products for its global market. It also expanded partnerships and debuted a partner program.

The mix of launched products span from an IoT platform and tool kit, a serverless service, a machine learning platform, a security software scanning service, an online backup service, and a dedicated hosting service. All of which Alibaba will be introducing to its global market.

In addition to the releases, Alibaba Cloud extended and named new partnerships. With China Unicom, it launched a Smart Access Gateway to support multiple location enterprise networks. In collaboration with HPE, Alibaba Cloud launched a stack of hybrid cloud services. And it extended its partnership with Elastic to offer Elastic’s open source tool Elasticsearch outside of China.

Elastic and Alibaba Cloud launched their partnership in October 2017 to enable Alibaba Cloud to offer a hosted version of Elasticsearch and the full breadth of its features. Elasticsearch is an application stack that allows users to search and analyze their data in real-time, said Craig Griffin, Elastic VP of alliances and business development.

Elasticsearch started as an open source project and expanded into a company with a series of commercial products. This Elastic Stack includes application search, application performance monitoring (APM), security, monitoring, machine learning, graph analytics, logging, and other search-related products. Alibaba Cloud’s hosted Elasticsearch service enables all of the features of the Elastic Stack on its cloud platform.

While previously the Alibaba Elasticsearch service was only available in the cloud providers' Chinese regions, it will now be available in all of Alibaba’s regions. “We saw the Alibaba relationship as an opportunity to accelerate our adoption in China,” said Griffin. “Elastic already had a presence in China, but because Alibaba is the cloud leader in China we saw this as an opportunity for even more users to adopt the Elastic products quickly.” He said the newest expansion will only continue Elasticsearch’s adoption and growth.

In order to expand outside of its Chinese market it launched the ASEAN Partner Alliance Programme. (ASEAN represents the ten countries that are part of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations.) Over the next year, the program intends to recruit 150 solution partners and train 600 sales and technology personnel.

Alibaba Cloud has expanded aggressively in recent years and now has 10 international cloud regions, eight of which are in the Asia Pacific region. These are in Tokyo; Singapore; Sydney; Frankfurt, Germany; Dubai; Virginia; Silicon Valley; Mumbai, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Most recently, Alibaba Cloud has focused on its growth in Malaysia. In July, it launched its second availability region in the country. Earlier in the year it named new collaborations with Malaysian companies, including a smart city project, and Alibaba Group opened an office in the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur in June.

Beginning to expand and introduce its products to these regions, particularly Southeast Asia, is just its most recent push to compete with the other major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google. Gartner recently said Alibaba Cloud was the third-largest provider in terms of public cloud market share, although it was the second-fastest growing at 62.7 percent in 2017.

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