Alibaba: Building a retail ecosystem on data science, machine learning, and cloud ZDNet

Virtually all shopping will take place at home. The war in retail has long ago gone technological. Amazon is the poster child of this transition, paving the way first by taking its business online, then embracing the cloud and offering ever more advanced services for compute and storage to thirrd parties via Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon may be the undisputed leader both in terms of its market share in retail and its cloud offering, but that does not mean the competition just sits around watching. Alibaba, which some see as a Chinese counterpart of Amazon, is inspired by Amazon's success.