Alibaba Cloud has started to expand its SaaS portfolio by bringing products it once offered only in China to other territories. The Register has learn

Alibaba Cloud brings chatty SaaS products out of China and into more markets

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2024-11-25 05:30:04

Alibaba Cloud has started to expand its SaaS portfolio by bringing products it once offered only in China to other territories.

The Register has learned that the Chinese web giant recently rebranded its "Elastic Cloud Phone" as just "Cloud Phone" and made it available in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Cloud Phone makes it possible to rent virtual Android devices that run in Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba suggests they're useful for roles including testing apps, streaming games, and providing a phone that remote customer reps can use to speak to customers and access enterprise data.

The virtual droids run on Arm servers and use the Shenlong virtualization tech. Alibaba explains that Shelling sees some workloads offloaded to a dedicated chip called a Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU), which seems to have the same role as the SmartNIC or "data processing unit" used by other hyperscalers.

Another Alibaba Cloud SaaS that's been offered to more of the world is DingTalk – a Microsoft Teams-like suite of communications and collaboration apps that has already won over 700 million users worldwide, most of them consumers.