B4| Wednesday, September 11, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Alibaba Sends Jack Ma Off With
Farewell Party Fit for a Rock Star
HANGZHOU, China—Twenty
years after former English
teacher Jack Ma founded online
retailer Alibaba Group Holding
Ltd. in an apartment in this
southern China metropolis, he bid
farewell to 60,000 employees
who packed a stadium to wish
him a happy birthday—and send
him off with an extravaganza of
song, dance and fireworks.
Mr. Ma retired as executive
chairman on Tuesday, his 55th
birthday, after two decades
spent molding Alibaba into
China’s dominant e-commerce
juggernaut and the country’s
most valuable private company,
worth nearly half a trillion dol-
lars. The company’s success
helped make him China’s richest
person and, paired with his cha-
risma, an international icon.
“The world is so beautiful,”
Mr. Ma told the crowd as a soft
piano melody played in the back-
ground. “There are so many
things I want to experience, I
want to try. Moreover, there are
so many bad and wrong things
in the world.”
Mr. Ma has said he plans to
devote his post-Alibaba life to
philanthropic causes, particularly
education and the environment.
Tuesday evening’s spectacle at
Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center
was officially Alibaba’s 20th anni-
versary party, a variety show jam-
packed with video clips, uplifting
speeches and song-and-dance
performances by employees.
The opening minutes of the
evening mimicked the Olympic
Games’ Parade of Nations, with
members and mascots of differ-
ent Alibaba divisions marching
around an athletic track.
The biggest cheers were
saved for the end, when a trac-
tor unit towed around the track
a mobile stage featuring Mr. Ma
sporting an orange guitar, bejew-
eled sunglasses and spiked
shoulder pads. He led a four-per-
son band of Alibaba senior exec-
utives dubbed the “A Band” in a
rendition of the Josh Groban
tune “You Raise Me Up.”
—Stu WooTECHNOLOGY
agreement with Amazon’s
cloud-computing unit, Amazon
Web Services.
Some hospital-system and
company officials said they ex-
pect to jointly develop new
software by combining data
and expertise of health-care
companies with tech giants’
computing power and engineer-
ing know-how. “Google can’t do
this alone. We can’t do this
alone,” said Cris Ross, Mayo’s
chief information officer. The
terms weren’t disclosed.
Patient records will be kept
private and access will be con-
trolled by Mayo, Mr. Ross said.
Data used to develop new soft-
ware will be stripped of any
information that could identify
individual patients before it is
shared with the tech giant.
Data analysis can identify
undetected patterns that will
help with insights into disease,
said Mr. Ross. Many algo-
rithms in development seek to
improve the speed or accuracyof tests that screen for disease.
“Being able to use this data
is almost like a new micro-
scope,” said Thomas Kurian,
Google Cloud’s chief executive.
Mayo and Providence St.
Joseph may also share intel-
lectual property from joint
software efforts, tech and
health-care executives said.
Google will open an office
for its engineers in Mayo’s
Rochester, Minn., headquar-
ters. Moving Mayo data to the
cloud—about three petabytes
and growing rapidly—is ex-
pected to be finished in about
three years, executives said.
In the past decade, hospi-
tals rapidly moved patient re-
cords to computers from pa-
per, creating an explosion of
data that is costly to store and
cumbersome to use because
hospitals rely on multiple soft-
ware programs that often
don’t work together. Now, hos-
pitals are seeking new ways to
collect and organize that data,so it can be analyzed for new
treatments or drug discovery.
Hospital systems have in-
vested heavily in their own
data storage, for greater con-
trol over data security, but at a
growing cost for increased ca-
pacity and improved cybersecu-rity, said health-care analysts.
Some have been reluctant
to write off that investment,
which has slowed entry into
the cloud, some analysts said.
That is changing as hospitals
weigh whether to opt for cloud
storage rather than replace ag-
ing data centers, said Gregg
Pessin, a health-care technol-ogy analyst at Gartner Inc., a
research and consulting firm.
Hospitals can’t buy computer
equipment as cheaply as tech
giants, which also have more to
invest in cybersecurity, he said.
Nonetheless, security risks
remain a concern. Capital One
Financial Corp. in July said the
bank suffered a breach of 106
million records from the cloud,
after a hacker allegedly took
advantage of a configuration
vulnerability.
Cerner will move some cor-
porate systems into Amazon’s
cloud along with data from
electronic health records and
other services, under its
agreement announced in July.
Cerner previously worked
with Amazon Web Services to
develop a prototype virtual
scribe to record information
from exam-room conversa-
tions into the medical record.
Health-care quality, opera-
tional improvement and waste
are all opportunities for ma-chine learning, said Shez Par-
tovi, director of global busi-
ness development for health
care, life sciences and genom-
ics for Amazon’s cloud unit.
Amazon, Microsoft and
Google are investing to win
health-care cloud business, in-
troducing built-in software to
more easily analyze data for
use by doctors and communi-
cate, said Jeffrey Becker, a se-
nior analyst at research and
consulting company Forrester
Research Inc. The companies
are competing for the cloud-
computing market, where Am-
azon is the largest by revenue,
Gartner data show.
As they compete for health-
care business, technology com-
panies are also making inroads
into that industry. Amazon ac-
quired online pharmacy Pill-
Pack Inc. and joined Berkshire
Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan
Chase & Co. in a health-care
joint venture to better control
employee health-care costs.Amazon.com Inc., Micro-
soft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s
Google are striking sweeping
agreements to store data and
develop software for hospitals,
as the technology giants wres-
tle for control in health-care
and cloud-computing markets.
Google on Tuesday said it
had made a 10-year deal with
the Mayo Clinic to store the
hospital system’s medical, ge-
netic and financial data. Prov-
idence St. Joseph Health in
July said it reached a data-
storage agreement with Micro-
soft. Later that month, Cerner
Corp., one of the largest elec-
tronic-health-record compa-
nies, unveiled its cloud-storage
BYMELANIEEVANS
Tech Giants Battle to Store Health Data
Amazon, Microsoft and
Google make hospital
deals to hold files in
cloud, build software
Analysis might
identify patterns
that will help make
insights into disease.AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Ma led a band of senior executives at a celebration of both the company's 20th anniversary and his 55th birthday in Hangzhou.HISPANIC
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