Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s cloud-computing unit Alibaba Cloud has chosen a Microsoft veteran to lead its research team as it aims to increase its big data and intelligence capabilities to gain an edge in the country's rapidly expanding big data market, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Zhou Jingren, who worked on the Bing search infrastructure team and big data unit of Microsoft Corp., was hired to become Alibaba Cloud's chief scientist.
The company said that Zhou will lead the company's research teams in Beijing, Hangzhou and Seattle, which will develop platforms to help business customers analyze big data.
AliCloud is planning to expand its user base and services, but currently, it has 500,000 paying customers for its storage, security, database management and other cloud-computing services.
It is estimated that the demand for cloud-based services will reach $20 billion by 2020, up from $1.5 billion in 2013, according to Bain & Co., a management consulting firm.
Bigger companies such as Amazon.com and Microsoft are Alibaba's rivals in the global cloud-computing market. Morgan Stanley has placed AliCloud's valuation at $39 billion, while Amazon Web Services is valued at $91 billion.
A recent research, however, said that by 2020, AliCloud could become the company's "most significant value drivers." For the current fiscal year ending March 2017, the bank raised AliCloud's revenue projection by 24 percent.
In an interview, Zhou said his department will help businesses how to manage and analyze their big data, partly by providing them with a platform with customized solutions. He cited that AliCloud's tools can be used by a company's customer-service division to monitor phone calls between consumers and customer-service representatives and help them detect problems and patterns.
The report, however, said that AliCloud is facing security issues with its services, as hacking is widespread and the government seldom checks.
Alibaba insisted that it does not share individual data and that AliCloud customers own their data, even when they use Alibaba's platforms.