Eyeing an aggressive expansion outside its native Chinese market, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s public cloud computing arm has launched a mass of new products and a new partner program.

The new offerings from Alibaba Cloud encompass a wide range of information technology fields, including cloud infrastructure, the “internet of things,” artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, designed to help enterprises across various industries digitize their business operations.

The headline grabber is Alibaba Cloud’s expanded partnership with Elasticsearch B.V., the company that develops Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine that’s used by enterprises to power extremely fast searches in support of data discovery applications. Alibaba Elasticsearch Cloud was previously only available in China, but now the companies are opening it up to customers in other nations as well.

With the expanded footprint, the companies said in a joint statement, customers outside China will now have access to the real-time search, ingestion, analytical capabilities and commercial features of the Elastic Stack within the Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch service.

In the realm of data and AI, Alibaba Cloud has added a new “serverless” Data Lake Analytics service for customers that want to get insights from their cloud-stored data. The company is also touting its Machine Learning Platform for AI, which enables customers with limited AI background to access to its AI capabilities. In addition, Alibaba announced a new IoT Platform for global customers looking to add sensors to and gain insights from various products and machines at the network edge.

On the security side, there’s a new Anti-Bot Service that helps enterprises to defend against malicious attacks on their IT infrastructure, a Hybrid Backup Recovery service for protecting business-critical data and a Dedicated Host for companies that need to adhere to regulatory requirements.

The other new products include a new Smart Access Gateway that can be used to build multiple location networks and Alibaba Cloud’s Apsara Stack. That’s a hybrid cloud platform similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Stack that’s used to generate public cloud capabilities in an environment completely isolated within an enterprise data center.

“This new suite of offering includes products that are highly efficient, cost effective, and some of them are the first of their kind in the industry,” said Alibaba Cloud International Chief Solution Architect Derek Wang.

Alibaba Cloud also announced a new ASEAN Partner Alliance Program for technology vendors, service providers, system integrators, ISVs and start-ups to “advance their digital transformation initiatives.” With the program, Alibaba Cloud said, it wants to recruit 150 “solutions partners” and train around 600 sales and technology personnel in order to help grow its ecosystem in the ASEAN region.

The new partner program and products represent a continuation of Alibaba’s efforts to expand its public cloud presence beyond China, which still accounts for the bulk of its business. The company has spent the last few years building out its data center infrastructure across Europe and the Middle East, Australia, ASEAN and Japan in order to do so, so the product expansion is a logical next step for the company as it strives to displace rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. Alibaba Cloud now offers 10 international regions, eight of which are located in Asia Pacific nations such as Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

It’s making progress, too. According to Gartner Inc.’s most recent report on the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service market, Alibaba Cloud now claims the third-largest market share at 4.6 percent, ahead of Google LLC, which only has 3.3 percent.

“Alibaba has quickly positioned itself as a potential top three cloud platform by offering interesting products that complement next-generation application use cases that companies are looking for, most prominently in AI and IoT, which have to be public cloud-based to really thrive,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “Equally important is the sign up of partners and certified professionals to help enterprises build these apps.”

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