MANILA - Alibaba Cloud is looking to further expand its market share in the cloud computing business in the Philippines by training 50,000 IT workers in its cloud ecosystem within the next 3 years.

The company said it also aims to certify at least 10,000 of these IT professionals as well as help 5,000 businesses in the Philippines on their digital migration by end-2023.

Alibaba Cloud currently ranks fourth globally behind Amazon Web Sevices, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, according to ZDNet.

But Alibaba Cloud is the largest public cloud service provider in the Asia-Pacific region thanks to its dominance of the Chinese market.

Demand for cloud computing services boomed as companies accelerated their digitalization initiatives because of the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the company said during its Apsara Conference 2020.

“A lot of digital departments are being accelerated,” said Lancelot Guo, vice president of Alibaba Group.

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The company said it has seen a drastic increase in demand for cloud computing for businesses, especially small and medium scale enterprises. Guo said that SMEs are more vulnerable than large conglomerates to the disruptions caused by COVID-19.

“We can see that Philippine SMEs are very eager to embrace cloud technology and we would like to bring our know-hows proven solutions supporting the various business units of Alibaba Group, including Fintech, retail, media and entertainment and logistics to the local customers,” the company said.

It said it is also banking on its familiarity with the Asian market to better compete with Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

“Alibaba Cloud originated from Asia so we know Asia market best,” the company said in a statement.

The company said it is already serving several industries in the Philippines and has even partnered with telco giant PLDT.

“Through our partnership with PLDT, Alibaba Cloud provided hybrid cloud and security solutions to the 30th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games for its eSports competition, ensuring high-speed connectivity and efficient handling of high data volume online,” Alibaba Cloud said.

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Temenos, a Switzerland-based banking software service provider, said last week its core banking product is now certified on Alibaba Cloud.

Financial institutions will be able to run Temenos' mission-critical core banking applications on Alibaba Cloud and benefit from elastic scalability, cost and operational efficiencies, Temenos said.

Martin Frick, Temenos managing director for Asia Pacific, said they expect traditional banks to “trickle” into the cloud as big banks are concerned about regulators and security risks.

Many neobanks, which are fintech-driven firms, meanwhile are already cloud-driven.

Meanwhile, as the United States continued to raise concerns about data privacy and security with Chinese tech companies, Alibaba Cloud said it is committed to complying with local laws and industry regulations wherever it operates across the globe.