Wang is widely seen as the man who laid the technological foundations to facilitate Alibaba’s emergence as an e-commerce giant.
In his book Being Online, published in 2016, Wang detailed his experiences building up Alibaba’s cloud business from scratch with the trust of founder Jack Ma.
Li Qiang, then governor of Zhejiang province and China’s premier, wrote in a forward for the book that he enjoyed talking with both Wang and Ma.
“In talking to Jack Ma, I get ‘There’s actually a new perspective to see the issue,’” he wrote. Whereas, Li wrote, when talking to Wang Jian, “I get, ‘The future may actually be like this.’”
When Wang, who has a doctorate in psychology, joined Alibaba in 2008 from Microsoft Research Asia, the concept of cloud computing was still in its infancy, but Wang’s vision convinced Ma and he built up the cloud business for Alibaba despite repeated internal questioning, according to local media reports.
Ma wrote in a forward for his book that “when I first met Dr Wang, I was mesmerised by his understanding of the internet and hated the fact that I could not have met him earlier”.
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Wang resigned from his role at Alibaba Cloud in 2013 but retained a position as honorary chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee.
Alibaba is currently at a critical juncture in its history, and is going through a restructuring from a large conglomerate into a collection of several relatively independent businesses, Alibaba Cloud being one of them.
Under the sweeping reorganisation of its US$257 billion empire, the cloud business will become one of six independently run entities.
While Alibaba Cloud remains the top cloud infrastructure services provider in mainland China with a 36 per cent share, its revenue growth has slowed and Alibaba is fighting to win big state clients against rival cloud service providers from Huawei Technologies Co, Tencent Holdings, Baidu and even China Telecom.
Wang is a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and he also became a new member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee, the country’s top advisory body, in 2023.
However, Wang, like many scientists, has had his share of failures. His vision of producing an Alibaba operating system for smartphones to challenge Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android did not succeed, for example.
In an interview with Chinese media in March, Wang described the industrial economy as an electric economy and the digital economy as a computing power economy.
He said that the best way for most businesses to access computing power is through cloud computing.
