The decision that stands out is happening at Alibaba Cloud, the third-largest public cloud infrastructure provider in the world only after AWS and Microsoft. Jeff Zhang, former president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, is stepping down while Daniel Zhang (unrelated), Alibaba’s CEO, takes over as acting president.

“Over the past four years, Jeff has led the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence team to deliver outstanding results in technological innovation and industry influence,” said Daniel in an internal email to staff.

“Revenue from customers in [the] internet industry declined about 18% that was mainly driven by declining revenue from the top internet customer that has gradually stopped using our overseas cloud service for its international business, online education customers, as well as softening demand from other customers in China internet industry.”

Domestically, Alibaba Cloud faces rivalry from its nemesis Tencent, which has a stronghold in games. It’s also competing with Huawei and Tianyi, the cloud offshoot of state telecom giant China Telecom, both of which are getting a headstart in supporting government and public infrastructure.

Alibaba CEO to oversee cloud arm following major server outage by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

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