Customers in industries spanning audio and video production, social media, gaming, e-commerce, content information and fintech have rapidly adopted Big Data and data lakes. Alibaba Cloud solutions support varied customer needs for a large-scale data analytics and data intelligence service.
Through data lakes, customers can build a Big Data platform for analysis and machine learning. The flexibility of a data lake can help customers save on resources, reduce the cost of data storage and avoid data-island problems. Machine learning is helping customers to enhance their growth and optimise their business processes including manufacturing, customer service, supply chain management and marketing. In addition, it improves employee engagement and enhances customer satisfaction.
Companies building their own Big Data platforms will usually encounter scalability and elasticity challenges. The best way to improve elasticity while reducing resource waste is to move to the public cloud.
Secondly, the performance of Big Data computing is directly related to the cost of computing resources. The higher the performance, the lower the cost. And cloud providers usually invest more on optimisation thus have better performance.
Setup and maintenance cost are also a concern. Companies need to hire several technical personnel to improve performance of a self-built platform on a continuous basis. This requirement places a heavy burden on companies and usually takes a long time to get operational.
For SMEs, the most effective and cost-efficient solution is to work with a cloud provider to runs a Big Data platform.
There has been a rise in demand from customers in the Middle East keen to implement digital transformation across their organisations. This trend has accelerated due to the pandemic. Companies of all sizes need to use a secure, reliable and stable Big Data platform.
A fintech customer in the UAE utilises Alibaba Cloud’s Big Data solution suite to build its data warehouse to store and process accumulating structured and unstructured data. The client uses analytics to generate value from data for commercial use, case design and decision making. Big data has led to improved efficiency, enhanced customer experience, and increased the company’s loyalty towards our products and services.
Alibaba Cloud offers Big Data products and solutions. These include:
MaxCompute, a fully managed, general purpose data store, processing platform for large-scale data warehousing with multiple computing engines for various computing models.
MC-Hologres, a real-time computing engine, data warehouse for serving and analytics
E-MapReduce, an all-in-one enterprise-ready Big Data platform based on Apache Hadoop with enhancements
Flink, a distributed streaming processing engine based on Apache Flink with enhancements
DataWorks, a unified data development and management platform
Machine Learning Platform for AI PAI, an end-to-end platform that provides various machine learning algorithms for data mining and analysis requirements
Alibaba Cloud has developed a data lake computing and analysis solution based on EMR that combines EMR and OSS Object Storage Service to form a data lake computing and analysis solution.
Big Data platform has now become essential for modern industries. Customers can use Alibaba Cloud’s Big Data solutions to set up and manage data processing pipeline for many scenarios, including Reporting, Customer Study, Advertisement, Social Media Analysis, Search Recommendation, Risk Control, Trend behavior predications.