October 27, 2014
Owner of Alibaba (阿里巴巴) is known in the West as Jack Ma, but his real name is Ma Yun (马云), or if translated literaly : Cloud Ma. If we consider the fact that the word “cloud” appears one hundred times in the Alibaba’s IPO prospectus, this anectode about the Ma Yun’s name shows also very clearly that the world’s biggest e-commerce company based in Hangzhou sees itself as a major cloud services provider.
For those who would like to know more about this world-class business, I will analyze the structure of Alibaba Group and then place the focus on their IT operations. The story about Alibaba is a blueprint for successful cloud and e-commerce companies.
Alibaba’s main source of revenue is a group of e-commerce businesses: