Alibaba Cloud Business Group was upgraded to Alibaba Cloud & Intelligent Business Group, and ZHANG Jianfeng (张建锋), the CTO of Alibaba Group, will also serve as the president of the new business group. Alibaba will start to pay more efforts on the development of IPv6, which would be part of the infrastructure of the era of IoT.
According to news from TechWeb on Nov 26, ZHANG Yong (张勇), the CEO of Alibaba Group, announced the company's organizational upgrade, in which Alibaba Cloud Business Group was upgraded to Alibaba Cloud & Intelligent Business Group, and ZHANG Jianfeng (张建锋), the CTO of Alibaba Group, will also serve as the president of the new business group, directly reported to ZHANG Yong. The former Alibaba Cloud President HU Xiaoming (胡晓明) would have another appointment (which later turned out to be the president of Ant Financial).
Dec 6, 2018, as the new president of Alibaba Cloud, ZHANG Jianfeng attended the company's public conference and announced that Alibaba Cloud is going to further develop its services of IPv6.
IPv6 is the next-generation Internet Protocol after IPv4. So far, Alibaba Group's businesses like Cloud Computing, Tmall, Taobao, Youku, Gaode, etc. had already started to use IPv6, and IPv6 will be also be used on Alipay comprehensively in December.
As the most leading cloud service company in China, Alibaba Cloud totally raised USD 1.2 billion in financing from Alibaba Group with a valuation of over USD 60 billion, according to IDC data in 2017, Alibaba Cloud accounted for almost half (45.5%) of China's public cloud service market, and globally ranked third right after thus It is true that Alibaba should take the lead in promoting the new technologies.
Compared with IPv4, IPv6 could provide much more IP addresses, and this will be quite important for the new era of IoT. It is said that the effective IP addresses that IPv4 can provide are only 4.3 billion and the IPv4 addresses have been all allocated in 2011. So the more devices need to be connected into the Internet, the more important IPv6 will be.
5G is coming, IoT is coming, ZHANG Jianfeng believed the IPv6 is going to replace IPv4 gradually in the next few years, and reach 100% coverage in 2025. However, so far the development of IPv6 in China still lags behind the USA and India, Alibaba Cloud has to work harder in this field to help China smoothly enter the era of 5G and IoT.