上海商学院

2023 ~ 2024 学年秋季学期 《Management Informat

ion System》Final
Assignment
Grade: 2021、2022
Majors: Business Administration Grade 21、22(International Stud
ents)

Class:214
Name : Fatima Benaissa

ID : 21204240416

The Importance of Management Information

Systems in Alibaba

Preface

The Alibaba Group is a group of internet-based businesses with a mission

to make it easy for anyone to buy or sell anything, anywhere in the world,
but especially to make Chinese businesses more open and accessible for
the world. The revenue of the Alibaba Group is running high, since they
achieve more sales than their competitors EBAY and Amazon.com
together. Alibaba is the first company to make market information and
data available for free to all the users, all over the world.
Customers/providers of goods can expand the reach of their business
quickly. In addition, the connection system of Alibaba and how they
connect business people with suppliers is fascinating. Their business
strategy has made them both well-known and successful in Asia already.
Alibaba’s international interest is to get more access to popular Western
brands, especially high-end and luxury brands, given the huge unmet
demand among Chinese consumers for products that are not yet available
in China. For that matter, it is likely that Alibaba will become a successful
brand for retailers all over the world for selling their products and since
the world is getting smaller, perhaps even for B2B or C2C markets.

Case study Alibaba Group: A successful Chinese and international digital b

usiness giant.

Research Background

Alibaba Group has become one of the most powerful e-commerce busines
s company. The firm was established by an English teacher named Jack M
a in 1999 and is headquartered in Hangzhou, China. The idea was to lunch
website that would help small Chinese exporters and entrepreneurs to sell
their products. An important millstone occurred in 2005, when Aliba
ba Group formed a strategic partnership with Yahoo. Ali baba.com, an
online marketing technology platform was launched in 2007 and after two
years Alibaba Cloud was established. Information management system is
the importance strong side of this company. Moreover, another landmar
k in this year was the acquisition of Chicana, China’s leading Interne
t infrastructure service provider. In 2010, Ali Express site was launched
and enabled exporters in China to reach consumers all over the world. T
he largest online commerce company went public in 2014, when it la
unched its IPO. The Chinese company expanded overseas and founded
offices abroad in Hong Kong, USA, UK, Taiwan and India. Today, the comp
any and its segment businesses operate wholesale and retail online mar
ketplaces additionally to internet-based businesses, which offer advertisin
g, electronic payment, cloud-based computing and network services and o
thers. Its dominant operations run through three web sites: Mall, which off
ers online sales of branded products and focuses on China’s middle
class; Baobab, China’s biggest shopping site; and Alibaba.com, which
connects Chinese exporters with other companies worldwide.
The Briefing of Research Contents

Why Management Information Systems is important for Ali baba?

*In a competitive world of e-commerce side, how Ali baba uses the
information system in their company?

*How they becoming success by using and storing the data in the
information management system?

*Which technology is used by Ali baba?

Alibaba's data is stored in Compute supports a set of proprietary SQL engi

nes and open-source computing capabilities like Spark . In addition to the
primary data warehouses and big data computing, Alibaba also has a Blin
k-based stream computing system.

In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, Alibaba has been a standout succe

ss story by intelligently applying AI technology in its sales domain. The Chi
nese giant company, founded by Jack Ma in 1999, has exceeded expectati
ons by fully harnessing artificial intelligence to drive its exponential growt
h in the global market.

Research meaning
By this research we will understand the technological uses in the company
of Alibaba. We will come to know the use of information management
system by Alibaba.

Literature review of Alibaba

Innovation is crucial for the competitiveness of companies with the
information management system. With the complex use of information
system methods, products, quality and internal processes can be
developed. Next to newer technologies and methods, emphasis should be
placed not only on radical technological innovations, but also on changing
and improving the production processes and the business models.
Information system can create value for the customers and the
shareholders, using CSR information systems, downstream and upstream
operations. Companies should develop technology and information system
strategy which determines how the company seeks and solves the
problem at an organizational level; synthesizes ideas, concepts and
design into business strategy. The paper explains the factors and methods
that Alibaba becoming successful in their innovation processes. The
information system of Alibaba, which plans to radically change the
business sector worldwide is discussed in details.

Research contents
The Big Data Platform Behind Alabama's E-Commerce System
s………….

The Alibaba Cloud 2021 Double 11 Cloud Services Sale is live now! For a li
mited time only you can turbocharge your cloud journey with core Alibaba
Cloud products available from just $1, while you can win up to $1,111 in c
ash plus $1,111 in Alibaba Cloud credits in the Number Guessing Contest.
By Gan Tao.
The gross merchandise volume (GMV) of last year’s Double 11 reached R
MB 268.4 billion, setting yet another Double 11 record. This article unveils
the advanced technologies, which have allow users from all over the world
to shop through Ali baba. Specifically, we will discuss the development of t
he big data platform that underlies Alibaba's e-commerce platform.

During an exclusive big data session, Gan Tao, a researcher from the Aliba
ba Cloud Intelligent Computing Platform Division, spoke about the constru
ction and considerations behind the Alibaba economy’s big data platform.

Their Perspective of Alibaba's big Promotion: Double 11

The role of information system report
The first thing we need to know about Double 11 is that it is Alibaba's larg
est online promotion. For consumers, Double 11 is something that happen
s in only one day, but it is a long-term project that requires a year's worth
of dedication and planning, and it affects the lives of millions of platform
merchants. From Alibaba's perspective, lots of thinking and preparation a
bout the related business and technologies needs to go into Double 11.
They view Double 11 in terms of the consumers, goods and geography inv
olved. First, when it comes to the consumers, during Double 11, they need
to understand what kinds of consumers will be browsing on Alibaba's e-co
mmerce platform, and what kinds of goods will they be interested in buyin
g and will see. In terms of goods, merchants need to know what goods will
be popular during the Double 11 event, because they will need to stock up
supplies far in advance. The consideration of geography is most prominen
tly involved in logistics, for example, the specific geographical locations w
here goods need to be stored in advance to achieve optimal logistical effic
iency. There are two major things that are deeply connected with the thre
e aspects they mentioned above. These two things are also key to the co
mpetitiveness of Alibaba's e-commerce platform. The first of these things i
s supply chain. If their supply chain can be laid out long in advance and wi
th the necessary flexibility and refinement, it will play an important role in
the promotion of brands and goods on the platform and the reduction of r
unning costs.

The second thing is logistics. A few years back, each Double 11 would turn
their warehouse system into a sort of breakdown state. In recent years, alt
hough the purchase volume has been rising steadily, zero logistical break
downs have occurred. Alibaba solved this problem by partnering with mer
chants to deploy products likely to be purchased by consumers in local wa
rehouses near consumers. This is a process of matching tens of millions of
products with billions of consumers.

In terms of technology, this is actually a competition that involves big data

and AI capabilities. To succeed in Double 11, an enterprise must have dat
a, computing power and algorithms that are required for predicting the sty
les, categories, and price ranges of products that different types of consu
mers would purchase. Merchants must determine the goods likely to sell
well and how many such goods they should stock in advance. Meanwhile,
the supply chain must determine the layout that is required to achieve the
optimal cost-performance ratio and then deploy goods to local warehouse
s, bringing them closer to customers. This is Alibaba's notion of A+B+C. H
ere, A refers to algorithms, B refers to big data and C refers to computing.
In this concept, the key to success is making sure you have the necessary
data volume, algorithm quality and low-cost computing power. Therefore,
from a technical perspective and for participating companies, the competi
tion in the Double 11 market is a competition between the big data and AI
capabilities of the companies involved.

The following figure shows the daily data volumes processed during Doubl
e 11. From 2015 to 2019, the daily data processing volume of Double 11 i
ncreased by about 70% annually. However, these data volumes do not onl
y need to be processed on the day of Double 11. In fact, from late Septem
ber to Double 11, they need to process large volumes of data every day. T
he operation staff, analysts and merchants run fine-grained algorithms on
this data to implement data mining and information processing. These pre
parations allow us to achieve optimal matching performance on the actual
day of Double 11.

In terms of the specific technology involved, there are three necessary co

nditions for success in Double 11: massive data volumes, low-cost comput
ing power and fast data iteration. Among them, the last condition deserve
s special attention. That is, they have to find a way to have tens of thousa
nds of algorithm engineers and data engineers quickly iterate by using the
data. This is as critical as the data volume and computing power they men
tioned above. The ability to perform fast iteration on massive data volume
s is essentially the capability of the data mid-end and data development pl
atform.
The Architecture of the Sara Big Data Platform
Alibaba's main data warehouses are located on Compute. Currently, this p
roduct has more than 100 thousand servers located in 10 data centers aro
und the world. This is where almost all of Alibaba's data is stored. Comput
e supports a set of proprietary SQL engines and open-source computing c
apabilities like Spark. In addition to the primary data warehouses and big
data computing, Alibaba also has a Blink-based stream computing system.
A complete Hadoop-based E-Map Reduce (EMR) solution is provided for clo
ud services. PAI jobs can run on Compute, Blink and EMR. In addition to PA
I, Alibaba's big data platform also includes Holograms, Graph Compute an
d Elasticsearch. In the middle, an integrated big data development platfor
m runs through Data Works. This integrates big data development and the
establishment of data pipelines into one system.

The History of the Sara Platform

Starting in 2002, all Alibaba data was stored in Oracle databases. Since e-
commerce businesses were originally classified as accounting businesses,
therefore all of their data was stored in Oracle databases. At the time, Alib
aba had the largest Oracle rack in Asia. After discovering that Oracle could
not support increased computing power, Alibaba migrated to Green plum.
Green plum adopts a distributed architecture that can be scaled up to the
petabyte level. However, after less than a year, it was clear that Green plu
m could not meet the development needs of Alibaba's business operations
Therefore, in 2008, Alibaba launched the Hadoop cluster, which marked A
labama's first foray into big data. Alibaba Cloud was founded in 2009 and
established the Sara brand. At that time, while considering whether to buil
d an Sara system ourselves, they launched a big data engine project, distr
ibuted storage project and distributed scheduling project together. In 201
0, Alibaba released Compute 1.0 for storage and computing. The underlyi
ng data basis is called Sara Distributed File System, and Job Scheduler is u
sed in the middle to support the microloan business of Ant Financial. In 20
13, Alibaba began to reach a certain level in scale and scalability, with abo
ut 5,000 servers. At this key moment, Alibaba launched a critical internal
project called "Moon Landing". This project called for all Alibaba data to be
centralized in one system. Therefore, they discussed whether to use Hado
op or their in-house Sara Distributed File System + Compute system, and
finally decided to use the latter. From 2013 to 2015, a complete moon lan
ding was achieved. In 2015, Alibaba used Compute to completely replace
Hadoop and built a complete Alibaba data mid-end based on Compute and
Data Works. In 2017, Alibaba believed that it was the time to update its en
gine, so they released Compute 2.0, a total reconstruction of the core engi
ne. At that time, a single cluster could be scaled to tens of thousands of se
rvers, and they had more than 10 data centers around the world. Recently,
Alibaba's work on Compute has included performance improvements and
the evolution of an automatic mid-end, or what they could call an automat
ic data warehouse.
To summarize the development of the Sara platform in a few sentences: L
ooking back on Alibaba's development over the past decade, they see a c
ontinuous pursuit of greater data scales and lower computing costs. Next,
they can also see a transition at Alibaba from open-source to in-house sol
utions, and now from in-house back to open-source solution, as is shown
with the recent developments of Blink. They have also moved from databa
ses to data warehouses, or to the data mid-end and now to automatic dat
a warehouses. Last, for their data lake, they initially chose the Hadoop sys
tem, but now it is necessary to consider how to integrate data lakes with d
ata warehouses.

The Core Issues Facing an Enterprise-level Computing Platform

Enterprise-level computing platforms must resolve many issues. The first i

ssue—which is a relatively simple issue, but nonetheless also very commo
n—is that we need reliable data exchange points. Here, the reliability nee
ds to be basically 100%, and it is necessary to ensure that the data is nev
er lost once stored in data centers. Second, we must strike a balance betw
een high performance and low cost. In addition to engine performance opt
imization, storage also needs to be considered. The third issue is how to e
nsure sound data management, sharing and security. The fourth issue is e
nterprise-level capabilities, such as how to implement enterprise-level aut
omated O&M. Fifth, we must support a wide range of unified computing ca
pabilities, including batch processing, stream processing, machine learnin
g, graph computing and interactive computing. The sixth issue is how to e
mbrace and integrate various ecosystems, including the integration of aut
onomous systems and ecosystems and the integration of data lakes and d
ata warehouses. The seventh issue is relatively simple, that is, the develo
pment language and efficiency. Elasticity and scalability are the eighth iss
ue. The final issue is how to improve the support of big data systems for A
I capabilities and whether we can use AI capabilities to optimize big data s
ystems.

Performance and Efficiency Optimizations

Alibaba faces four challenges related to performance and efficien
cy:

When the number of servers exceeds 10,000, costs will continue to increa
se. Therefore, the cost requirements of large-scale customers in the cloud
are crucial.
Alibaba's data and computing power are growing very fast. Looking at Dou
ble 11, the annual growth rate of data processing is about 70%, but it is n
ot possible for us to increase our hardware investment by 70% each year.
Therefore, it is necessary to break the linear relationships between data a
nd computing power growth.
Currently, technological development has entered regions not covered by
open-source software. Generally, open-source software cannot meet the r
equirements of ultra-large-scale applications, so we need to solve this pro
blem ourselves.
They have found a large number of small clusters, but cannot achieve loa
d balancing among them. Therefore, they need to solve the problem of lo
w utilization when using many clusters.
In response to these problems and challenges, they can optimize computi
ng, storage and resources. Here they focus on resource optimization, whic
h means hybrid deployment. It should be noted that, when Alibaba consid
ers resource optimization, they do not consider the cost and efficiency of
a single job, but focus on improving the utilization rate of the entire cluste
r. Alibaba set a mandatory goal of improving the cluster utilization rate to
over 60%.

Benefits of information systems in company of Alibaba

Even the simplest use of technology can dramatically improve your busine
ss' productivity and efficiency. Arguably, the greatest benefit of informatio
n systems is their ability to give users the information they need to carry o
ut tasks efficiently.

Importance of information systems IT systems can produce:

custom data to help with a specific task or decision-making custom format

(deg list, chart, etc) which can be tailored to the user's need real-time dat
a, particularly useful where fast action is needed (deg mechanical fault) ar
chived data, particularly useful for reports, analysis and business planning

Other advantages of information systems.

Technology systems can also benefit a business by enabling:

*Operational efficiencies
*Cost reductions
*Supply of information to decision-makers
*Better customer service
*Continuous availability of the systems growth in communication capabiliti
es and methods
To maximize the benefits of your IT system, you have to fully utilize all its
features and functions. For example, you can:
Use instant messaging, emails, voice and video calls, and even chatbot te
chnology to improve communication with customers and suppliers. This co
uld save you time, money and effort, allowing you to react quickly to new
work.
Integrate your back-office systems to reduce administrative costs. For exa
mple, you can link your online e-commerce shop front with stock control a
nd accounting systems to streamline your processes.
Use labeling products with unique numbers and scannable bar-codes to bo
ost your efficiency, and improve your stock control and supply chain mana
gement.
Use different solutions, such as customer relationship management syste
ms or mobile technology, to improve levels of customer service. These ma
y help you record, organize and plan contact with customers, access custo
mer details on the go and view customer interactions.
It is important to weigh up the benefits of new IT systems against the cost
s and potential challenges. One way to ensure that your new system deliv
ers value is to align IT with your business strategy.

Key systems applications

Why databases are key to Alibaba’s Singles’ Day sales

With each order split into multiple database transactions, ensuring the sca
lability and elasticity of database systems was key to the success of Aliba
ba’s Singles’ Day sales.

At the stroke of midnight on this year’s Singles’ Day, online shoppers in

China and across Asia started placing orders on Alibaba’s e-commerce
sites that saw peak orders hit a whopping 583,000 per second.

This was 1,400 times the peak volume of the inaugural event 12 years
ago on 11 November 2009. To cope with the record number of orders,
which amounted to $74.1bn in gross merchandise value this year, Alibaba
had to shore up its infrastructure.

With each order split into multiple database transactions, ensuring the
scalability and elasticity of Alibaba’s database systems was key, said Li
Feifei, president of database business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence in an
interview with Computer Weekly.

By using cloud-native databases that support online transaction

processing, as well as offline batch processing and big data workloads,
Alibaba had been able to achieve zero downtime in what has now become
the world’s largest online shopping event.

As an example of the workloads that Alibaba's database systems were

grappling with this year, Polar, a relational database, set a new record
with 140 million queries per second during peak time, a 60% increase
from last year. In addition, Analytic, the company’s self-developed cloud-
native data warehouse, processed up to 7.7 trillion lines of real-time data,
equal ling 15 times the data contained in the UK web archive at the British
Library.

The same database systems were also used by China Post to deal with
over 100 million orders during the shopping event, with about 100,000
China Post users checking their parcels’ real-time status online.

Making its commercial debut this year was Blindworm, Alibaba's cloud-
native multi-model database that is compatible with multiple open-source
interfaces such as HBase, Phoenix, Outspent and Soar.

Conclusion
Alibaba Group has achieved great success in managing online trading
platform that support Ames with the develop of the information
management system. There are many marketing ways to boost sales in
order to earn higher revenues by information system. Let’s take Ali
Express platform as an example on displaying ways it used to boost sales.
Firstly, Ali Express has launched Super Deals that enable shoppers can
buy different categories of products at a lower discounted prices. Besides
that, Ali Express also organized Single Days’ Shopping Festival that
branded by Alibaba. This Double Eleven Shopping Day is the biggest
online shopping event worldwide. However, the accounting method is
complex and high controversy.
Besides the special deals provided, Ali Express has effective
communication systems in order to facilitate the conversation between
shoppers, company, trading partners and so on. For example, users’
reviews and rating systems and social networking such as Facebook and
Twitter, provide a platform for multiple parties to share exchange and
interact between each other to get latest information.

In addition, the company has provided additional services in order to

enable websites visitors or customers to have better shopping experience.
For instance, they provide various language support, delivery methods,
payment methods, currency support, shopping application, user guidance
and etc.
Moreover, awareness and participation of Alibaba in virtual world is
leading Alibaba as well as its platforms to more success path. For
instance, Alibaba wishes to implement the VR payment system in order to
change the traditional shopping patterns. Furthermore, Alibaba
implemented Chat Room, Buy+, augmented reality and amplification in
such virtual world as well.
As we all know that both Alibaba and Ali Express platform have achieved
huge success in online businesses. There are few key factors that lead to
the success of Ali Express which including competent management team,
commitment to company cultures and values, brand building, pricing
strategy, and so on.
In sum, Ali baba as well as Ali Express have successfully transformed
themselves over the years. They are adapting to the dynamic changes
and demands of online business in order to provide better services to their
customers in fulfilling customers’ satisfaction since customers’ satisfaction
is the key driven for them to continue move forward by helping
information management system.
All in all, the story of Ali baba and Ali Express shows a real example of
how a small start-up company relies on the power of the Internet to make
it grow, bit by bit in the world economy.

References
1.Source: Glowing, Mario: Global strategies in the
service industries. Dynamics, analysis and growth.
London and New York: Rout ledge, Taylor and Francis
Group.
\
2. Alibaba’s overview
http://www.alibabagroup.com/en/about/overview

3. Yogish Pai U.1, & K. G. Nandha Kumar2

Research Scholar, College of Computer Science and Information Science,
Srinivas
University, Mangalore, India
ORCID-ID: 0000-0002-4266-2809; Email: [email protected]
Associate Professor, College of Engineering and Technology, Srinivas
University, India
ORCID-ID: 0000-0002-5716-7122; Email: [email protected]

4. Muhammad Farooq Javed

Business Plan | Articles Writing | Academic Research
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Freelance
From University of East London
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in-revenue/Liu,
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