Alibaba introduces cloud-computing service for vendors

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, the Chinese e-commerce giant, officially introduced a cloud-computing service on Tuesday to provide information technology to vendors and e-commerce service providers on its online shopping arms.

The service, named Jushita — which means stone-gathering tower — enables users to save IT costs and gain efficiency with the use of various functions, such as data storage and supply chain management, the company said.

At the same time, Alibaba Group named Jonathan Lu as its chief data officer, the first post of this kind to be set up in the company, as part of its efforts to further make use of e-commerce data. Lu previously led Taobao.com, a large online-shopping website.

Alibaba Group, which controls more than 70 percent of China's online retail market with Taobao.com and Tmall.com, expects the value of the transactions conducted on those two online shopping arms to hit 3 trillion yuan ($471.6 billion) in the next three to five years. That is predicted to surpass what Wal-Mart Stores Inc will record during the same period, Zeng Ming, the company chief strategy officer said last month.

The company said the cloud service will add functions related to analysis of buyer activities in the future, which are the most important part of what online vendors want to do with trade data.

More than 20,000 online sellers and e-commerce service providers have been using the service since May, it said.