Alibaba has made some changes to its senior management team, putting the CEO directly in charge of its cloud computing business. The Chinese tech giant regularly reshuffles its management annually to keep up with the ever-evolving internet space and with the growth of the team.
In an internal email sent to employees on Thursday, chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang said he would serve as acting president of Alibaba Cloud, overseeing the cloud computing business and work collaboration tool DingTalk.
Jeff Zhang, the former president of Alibaba Cloud, is now focused on leading Alibaba's research institute DAMO Academy. He also retains oversight of the chip development team, T-Head, and Internet of Things (IoT) projects.
“Over the past four years, Jeff has led the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence team to deliver outstanding results in technological innovation and industry influence,” said Daniel in the email.
Jingren Zhou will serve as CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence in addition to his current role as deputy head of the DAMO Academy.
Zeming Wu, former CTO of Alibaba's local service business, succeeded Li Cheng as CTO of Alibaba. Cheng will continue to work with Daniel Zhang as an advisor on technology.
Daniel, the top brass, has clearly placed a high value on cloud computing business as he has put himself in charge of cloud operations.
While cloud computing represents only a small portion of the Alibaba's overall revenue currently, the management team sees it as one of its three growth engines, along with domestic consumption and globalization.
According to Gartner, Alibaba is the world’s third-largest cloud computing player behind Microsoft and Amazon.
To expand its customer base and attract more users from countries like Singapore and Thailand, Alibaba has been opening new data centers outside of China over the past few years.
In domestic market, while Alibaba Cloud leads by market share, it faces increasing competition from rivals such as Tencent, Huawei and Tianyi, the cloud unit of state-owned telecom behemoth China Telecom. As part of an effort to bolster its cloud business, Alibaba Cloud said in September it would invest $1 billion over the next three fiscal years to support its customers.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that the management change in the cloud business comes just days after some customers were affected by the outage of Alibaba's Hong Kong servers.
The incident, which happened between Dec. 19 and Dec. 20, resulted in the suspension of withdrawals at major cryptocurrency exchange OKX and disabled the website of the Monetary Authority of Macau.
In the email, Daniel set Alibaba's development theme for the next year as "aggressive"(进), which is a dramatic shift from the theme set as "stable" (定) in early 2022.
"We couldn't be more sure that development is the top priority, because it can solve the problems we face," the CEO said, "2023 will be a critical year to seize the growth opportunities, all Alibaba employees should carry the enterprising spirit to gather strength and forge ahead."
“As the country enters a new stage of living with covid and policymakers have given direction to the future development of the platform economy, we are more confident than ever that continued development is the key to solving the challenges we face today,” Daniel wrote in his email to staff.