Alibaba Group Holdings, the official cloud services and e-commerce partner for the Olympics until 2028, said Tuesday that it wants to leverage its cloud-based technologies to make Olympic operations more efficient and cost effective.
And its vision will start with next month’s Winter Games in PyeongChang, which Alibaba believes will become a critical learning ground for figuring out what it can do to improve its cloud technologies so that it can do a better job at the next Olympics.
“In PyeongChang, it’s important for Alibaba to learn from the organizing committee. We’ll take back what we learn, discuss the issues and find more innovative solutions for future games,” said Alibaba’s Chief Marketing Officer Chris Tung in an interview with the press.
Alibaba’s Chief Marketing Officer Chris Tung (Alibaba)
“We’ll also share thoughts with the organizers and the IOC about how we think we can take them to another level with cloud technology and big data analytics,” Tung said.
According to Tung, Alibaba plans to apply its cloud-based technologies to address various needs, including cloud computing, e-commerce, media content, management systems, content distribution systems and media center operations.
Cloud computing refers to storing and accessing data, apps and programs on the internet, instead of hosting them on a physical hard drive. Public cloud providers like Alibaba rent out cloud space to clients on a pay-per-use basis.
With cloud technology, Alibaba is looking to help the International Olympics Committee and the hosting states drive down the costs of staging the games, which has long involved building from scratch new localized data centers and IT service systems for every Olympics.
An Olympics statue sits outside the Main Press Center inside the Alpensia Olympic Park in PyeongChang (Yonhap)
“Cloud is proven to be most cost-effective IT infrastructure. As we migrate more core technology modules to the cloud, a lot of the technology and data can be more easily organized and reused by the next Organizing Committee,” Tung said.
The Alibaba chief marketing officer also believes that cloud-based technologies could make the Olympics more engaging for spectators, athletes and the media, whether it is navigating around event venues or buying tickets.
At PyeongChang next month, Alibaba is preparing an “Olympic Showcase” to demonstrate a number of new cloud-based concepts it is looking to pursue for future Olympic events, including facial recognition technology, travel guidance, content creation and next-generation e-commerce.
By Sohn Ji-young (
jys@heraldcorp.com)
