When Alibaba Group Holding Ltd announced this month that it would commit $15 billion to increase its research and development initiatives between now and 2020, one of the sidebars to that news was the expansion of its presence in the U.S., specifically Silicon Valley. With data centers and small offices already established in the greater Bay Area, Alibaba now plans to increase its Silicon Valley footprint with a new research and development lab to be located in San Mateo, California.

The e-commerce giant’s latest news continues a strategy of building global connections outside of mainland China, not just for Alibaba, but for its sphere of enterprise companies as well. “Not only are we finding new technology companies, we’re also helping them find new partners to build up an extended ecosystem in Silicon Valley,” said Karen Lu (pictured, right), director of business development for Alibaba Cloud.

Lu stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (left), at The Computing Conference in Hangzhou, China. They discussed the company’s interest in building more developer community relationships and Alibaba’s inclusive approach within the technology ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

New partnership open to developers

In addition to an expanded commitment to R&D and plans for Silicon Valley, Alibaba has been reaching out more strongly to build new developer community relationships. Just a few weeks ago, the company announced a new partnership with Elasticsearch BV, the Amsterdam open-source search platform company, to provide Alibaba Cloud customers with search, data analytics and logging tools.

The agreement will open the China market to an Elasticsearch global universe of more than 5,000 developers. “We want to enable the developer community,” Lu said. “We’re actually working with a lot of open-source partners.”

As Alibaba’s global presence in the e-commerce and cloud market continues to expand, the company is pursuing an approach designed to embrace as many communities as possible. “We want to make sure technology is an inclusive element for everyone in the community, not just for the programmers or developers,” Lu said. “That’s the core value for us as an inclusive technology provider.”

You can view the complete video above, and there’s more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of The Computing Conference. (* Disclosure: Coverage of the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference is sponsored by Intel. All content is controlled by SiliconANGLE, and neither Intel nor Alibaba has editorial influence on the coverage.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE