Alibaba Cloud - Experts & Thought Leaders

Bosch, a pioneering supplier of technology and services, and Alibaba Group, a global technology company focused on e-commerce and cloud computing, announced an expanded strategic partnership to accelerate digital transformation through advanced cloud computing and AI technologies. The enhanced collaboration will focus on cloud-based enterprise operations, AI-driven business innovations, and e-commerce expansion. Alibaba’s advanced cloud infrastructure “Our partnership opens up exciting opportunities for both Bosch and Alibaba to expand our offerings in the global market,” said Dr. Tanja Rückert, member of the Bosch board of management and Chief Digital Officer. “By joining forces, we combine Alibaba’s advanced cloud infrastructure, AI capabilities and e-commerce market reach with Bosch’s deep technological expertise in mobility, industrial technology and consumer goods to drive greater efficiency and innovation worldwide." "AI has been an innovation booster for Bosch across all business sectors, and cooperation with strong partners like Alibaba is essential for Bosch realising its full potential and creating greater value.” Alibaba’s strengths in AI and cloud computing “This partnership with Bosch demonstrates our commitment to empowering global businesses with world-class technologies and highlights Alibaba’s strengths in AI and cloud computing,” said Joe Tsai, Chairman of Alibaba Group. “Bosch’s pioneering expertise in advanced automotive solutions and household appliances, combined with Alibaba’s innovations in cloud, AI and e-commerce, will enable both our companies to bring compelling value propositions to customers worldwide.” Powering innovation through cloud services and AI The collaboration between the two groups covers multiple business areas, like corporate operations The expanded partnership – focusing on cloud migration and AI cooperation - marks a significant step further in bolstering Bosch’s digital operations and fostering industrial innovation.  As part of Bosch Group’s cloud hyperscalers strategy, the collaboration between the two companies covers multiple business areas, such as corporate operations, home appliances and commercial vehicles, to enhance operational efficiency and enable smarter business processes. In addition, the two companies intend to collaborate on exploring the potential of running Bosch’s intelligent driving environment on Alibaba Cloud’s AI infrastructure.  Qwen’s visual language model The partnership will leverage Alibaba’s AI capabilities to support Bosch’s businesses, boosting operational efficiency and enhancing product intelligence.  Qwen-based multimodal models to elevate the smart cockpit experience with more intuitive In the automotive sector, for instance, the two companies plan to evaluate Qwen-based multimodal models to elevate the smart cockpit experience with more intuitive in-vehicle interactions. The two companies also intend to explore the possibility of the development of next-generation automated driving solutions powered by Qwen’s visual language model to enhance scene recognition accuracy.  Driving global E-commerce growth Bosch and Alibaba will also drive growth and innovation in e-commerce via an expanded product portfolio As a key pillar of the expanded partnership, Bosch and Alibaba will further drive growth and innovation in e-commerce through an expanded product portfolio, enhanced customer engagement, and optimised brand experience.  In 2025, Bosch plans to launch new product categories in China with consumer insights from Alibaba’s e-commerce platform. Alibaba will also support Bosch in reaching a broader consumer base in China through comprehensive omni-channel digital marketing. Bosch and Alibaba’s collaboration in e-commerce Based on the framework of collaboration in China, Bosch will extend its e-commerce footprint to Southeast Asia, Spain, and Latin America through Alibaba’s global e-commerce platforms, including Lazada, Miravia, and AliExpress, to better serve local consumers with innovative, high-quality products. Bosch and Alibaba’s collaboration in e-commerce began in 2017. Bosch has since established a strong presence on Alibaba’s Tmall platform, offering a wide range of consumer-focused products, including home appliances, power tools, heating systems, and automotive aftermarket parts. Joint efforts across marketing, sales, membership programs and online-to-offline services have significantly strengthened Bosch’s digital ecosystem and customer engagement in China.

Alibaba has unveiled Wan2.2-S2V (Speech-to-Video), its latest open-source model designed for digital human video creation. This innovative tool converts portrait photos into film-quality avatars capable of speaking, singing, and performing.  Part of Alibaba’s Wan2.2 video generation series, the new model can generate high-quality animated videos from a single image and an audio clip. Visual representations Wan2.2-S2V offers versatile character animation abilities, enabling the design of videos across options Wan2.2-S2V offers versatile character animation capabilities, enabling the creation of videos across multiple framing options, including portrait, bust, and full-body perspectives. It can generate character actions and environmental factors dynamically based on prompt instructions, allowing professional content creators to capture precise visual representations tailored to specific storytelling and design requirements. Advanced audio-driven animation technology Powered by advanced audio-driven animation technology, the model delivers lifelike character performances, ranging from natural dialogue to musical performances, and seamlessly handles multiple characters within a scene. Creators can now transform voice recordings into lifelike animated movements, supporting a diverse range of avatars, from cartoon and animals to stylised characters. Flexible output resolutions To meet the diverse needs of professional content creators, the technology provides flexible output resolutions of 480P and 720P.  This ensures high-quality visual output that meets various professional and creative standards, making it suitable for both social media content and professional presentations. Innovative technologies Wan2.2-S2V transcends traditional talking-head animations by mixing text-guided motion control Wan2.2-S2V transcends traditional talking-head animations by combining text-guided global motion control with audio-driven fine-grained local movements. This enables natural and expressive character performances across complex and challenging scenarios. Another key breakthrough lies in the model's innovative frame processing technique. By compressing historical frames of arbitrary length into a single, compact latent representation, the technology significantly reduces computational overhead. This approach allows for remarkably stable long-video generation, addressing a critical challenge in extended animated content production. Alibaba’s research team The model’s advanced capabilities are further amplified by its comprehensive training methodology. Alibaba’s research team constructed a large-scale audio-visual dataset specifically tailored to film and television production scenarios. Using a multi-resolution training approach, Wan2.2-S2V supports flexible video generation across diverse formats – from vertical short-form content to traditional horizontal film and television productions. Alibaba Cloud’s open-source community Wan2.2-S2V model is available to download on Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s open-source community, ModelScope. A major contributor to the global open-source community, Alibaba open-sourced Wan2.1 models in February 2025 and Wan 2.2 models in July. To date, the Wan series has generated over 6.9 million downloads on Hugging Face and ModelScope.

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, has been named a pioneer in The Forrester Wave: Serverless Development Platforms, Q2 2025 report. The report assessed 11 vendors over six months, evaluating them across 21 criteria, including developer experience, partner ecosystem, API and event-driven integration, AI application development, and vision. Alibaba Cloud, with its Function Compute and Serverless App Engine product capabilities, achieved the highest score possible (5 points) in 9 out of 21 criteria, including initialisation and deployment, workload flexibility, observability, AI application development, and innovation, among others. Alibaba Cloud’s platforms Alibaba Cloud combines localised innovation with broad enterprise adoption Jiangwei Jiang, Vice President, General Manager of Infrastructure Products, Alibaba Cloud, said: "For us, this recognition from Forrester reflects Alibaba Cloud’s continued focus on advancing serverless development.” “The development of AI applications remains a priority in our serverless solutions, as we strive to combine innovative cloud technologies with reliable customer support—helping businesses of all sizes adopt the latest advancements for their growth.” The report stated that Alibaba Cloud’s platforms, including Function Compute and Serverless App Engine, deliver scalable event-driven computing with strong integration across the Alibaba ecosystem. As a market front-runner in China and the broader APAC region, Alibaba Cloud combines localised innovation with broad enterprise adoption. Serverless development According to the report, Alibaba Cloud demonstrates strategic strength in serverless development through sustained innovation, including a commitment to open source and reinforcement of ecosystem growth. In terms of capabilities, Alibaba Cloud offers one of the most comprehensive serverless platforms in the market, with strong capabilities across initialisation, deployment, and runtime flexibility. AI application development was a key focus area, with native support for model deployment and event-driven inference workflows. Constant innovation Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service Launched in 2017, Alibaba Cloud’s Function Compute is a fully managed, event-driven compute service which alleviates users from managing their own infrastructure. Its secure and stable, pay-as-you-go platform is designed to simplify the computing experience to enable faster development and iteration of business logic and core code. Function Compute powers Alibaba Cloud’s generative AI development platform, Model Studio, and open-source ModelScope Community with model inference and training support, as well as elastic invocation capabilities for Agent and MCP services. Serverless App Engine Alibaba Cloud Serverless App Engine (SAE) is the industry’s first application-orientated serverless PaaS, providing a cost-effective and highly efficient one-stop application hosting solution. This Kubernetes-based cloud product combines the serverless architecture & the microservice model, allowing users to deploy an online application in any programming language to SAE within seconds by using source code, a code package, or a Docker image. Alibaba Cloud serverless solutions have supported over 10,000 enterprises worldwide across sectors including e-commerce, manufacturing, education, media and entertainment, internet, gaming, among others.

Where and how to store security camera footage usually depends on the scale of the video surveillance project, the way you are using to record the video and how long you want to keep the recordings. If there are only few IP cameras, say 2~3 IP cameras for example, and you don’t need to keep the recordings for the month, usually using SD card which is installed in the camera is enough. Video management software A VMS provides a unified platform to manage all cameras and record footage onto centralised local storage servers If there are more than four cameras, even up to 128 cameras, NVR or CVR become the practical choice for managing and storing recordings reliably. However, if there are hundreds or thousands cameras, which need to managed and recorded, in this way video management software with centralised recording storage becomes essential. A VMS provides a unified platform to manage all cameras and record footage onto centralised local storage servers. S3-compatible cloud platforms Critically, if the VMS supports the S3 object storage protocol, users gain the flexibility to store recordings on S3-compatible cloud platforms (public or private), offering significant hardware cost savings and enhanced scalability. For such demanding environments, selecting a VMS built on an open platform architecture is strongly advised, ensuring the system can expand infinitely to meet future project growth. Video surveillance management system Users can seamlessly add subordinate servers (or disk groups like IPSAN/NAS), disk arrays, and network bandwidth Take the video surveillance management system SVMS Pro as an example. Its foundation is an open 1+N stackable architecture, enabling unlimited expansion of recording storage servers. Users can seamlessly add subordinate servers (or disk groups like IPSAN/NAS), disk arrays, and network bandwidth.  This achieves extended recording durations and boosted storage performance while maintaining system stability during sustained operation (assuming environmental requirements are met). Key architectural advantages Each centralised storage module based on a Linux OS, supports up to 200 front-end video channels per server. Its N+1 stackable expansion capability utilises a distributed architecture, forming clusters of storage servers. Scaling the project involves simply adding subordinate storage modules – no modifications to existing deployments are required. Seamless S3 object storage integration Furthermore, SVMS Pro features deep integration of the S3 object storage protocol Furthermore, SVMS Pro features deep integration of the S3 object storage protocol. This allows seamless connection to major public cloud services like Alibaba Cloud OSS, Tencent Cloud COS, and Amazon S3 cloud, as well as private S3-compatible object storage solutions. This integration delivers truly limitless capacity expansion, leveraging the inherent elasticity of the cloud to effortlessly accommodate petabyte-scale video growth. Dual insurance: Multi-layered data protection The critical value of security data comes with inherent risks; losing video footage can lead to immeasurable losses. To mitigate these risks comprehensively, SVMS Pro innovates with its "Local + Cloud" Dual-Backup mechanism, leveraging S3 features to build multiple security layers: Real-Time Dual-Writing: Recordings are first written to the local disk (acting as a cache buffer). Upon local persistence, data is simultaneously replicated to cloud-based S3 storage, guaranteeing instant failover if either node fails. Smart Hot/Cold Tiering: Frequently accessed ("hot") data remains on high-performance local storage, while historical footage is automatically archived to low-cost cloud tiers, optimising storage expenses. Cross-Regional Disaster Recovery: Utilising the multi-replica and cross-region replication features of carrier-grade S3 storage inherently protects against physical disasters like earthquakes or fires. Additionally, the platform ensures comprehensive data protection through integrity verification and encrypted transmission, safeguarding data integrity and confidentiality across its entire lifecycle – from storage and transmission to access. Conclusion In essence, selecting the optimal storage solution for security footage hinges on a fundamental understanding of scalability requirements, retention needs, and data protection imperatives. As surveillance deployments grow from a few cameras to enterprise-scale systems, the underlying architecture must evolve: Localised storage (SD cards/NVRs) suffices for limited scope and short retention. Centralised VMS platforms become essential for unified management at scale, with open, modular architectures providing critical future-proofing for expansion. S3 object storage integration represents a paradigm shift, decoupling storage capacity from physical hardware and enabling truly elastic, cost-efficient scaling – both on-premises and in the cloud. Ultimately, successful large-scale video surveillance storage relies on architecting for flexibility, embedding data protection intrinsically, and strategically leveraging object storage protocols to balance performance, cost, and resilience – principles essential for safeguarding critical security data now and in the future.