BEIJING, December 29 (TMTPOST) — Daniel Zhang, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, will take over the cloud segment, according to an announcement made by the company on Thursday.

As the acting president of the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, Zhang will also oversee the enterprise communication and collaboration platform DingTalk, which was merged into the cloud computing business in 2019.  While Jeff Zhang stepped down as cloud business chief, he remained leader of the DAMO Academy, an in-house research program on cutting-edge technologies. He will also be in charge of the company’s chip unit T-head and the Internet of Things initiatives.

Zhou Jingren kept his role as the deputy head of DAMO Academy, while being appointed the chief technology officer (CTO) of Alibaba Cloud. Meanwhile, Wu Zeming, 42, succeeded Cheng Li as the company’s CTO.

Such appointments should lay a foundation for the company’s technology development from a long-term perspective, with Jeff Zhang focusing on technological breakthroughs, CEO in charge of long-term development and the relatively young senior executive overseeing applications.

“As the country enters a new stage of living with Covid-19 and policymakers have given direction to the future development of the platform economy, we are more confident than ever that continued development is the key to solving the challenges we face today,” said Daniel Zhang in an internal email to staff announcing the executive appointments.

Jane Jiang will replace Judy Tong as chief people officer on April 1, 2023. Alibaba usually adjusts its organizational structure after the Double 11 shopping festival each year, based on changes in the overall environment and the market, as well as its prediction of future development.

Developing cloud business is one of the three strategic priorities of the company. As of June, Alibaba Cloud operated millions of servers in 27 countries and regions, serving more than 4 million customers worldwide

 “In the past, from distributed system to resource pooling, we were all in the CPU-centric cloud era. In fact, we have also completed a lot of innovations, like resource pooling. However, with the growth of data, the enlargement of the scale and the increasingly high requirement against network delay, it is necessary to call for a new technical system to meet the requirements of the next stage,” Jeff Zhang told TMTPost.