In 2017, the digital economy exploded, and the cloud computing industry entered the brand era
For the cloud computing industry in 2016, a landmark event was that the G20 Hangzhou Summit took the digital economy as one of the four actions of the "G20 Blueprint for Innovative Growth". In fact, with the rapid development of cloud computing and big data technology, with the Internet as the integration platform and data resources as the core element, the driving role of information technology for the digital economy is increasingly showing an explosive growth trend. There is no doubt that the digital economy will explode in 2017.
According to the estimation data first released by the China Information and Communication Research Institute in September 2016, China's information economy in 2015 totaled 18.6 trillion yuan, accounting for 27.5% of GDP. The first China's information economy index IEI shows that China's information economy is currently in a rapid development stage, and the growth rate of the information economy is significantly higher than China's macroeconomic boom index, becoming an important engine to drive economic growth.
Cloud computing and big data are the important foundation and driving force for the development of the information economy. Since the launch of AWS and the birth of Hadoop by Amazon in 2006, the cloud computing big data industry has gone through the first decade. Today, the cloud computing industry has entered the second stage of development, that is, the brand era represented by security, reliability and service capability, and centered on product quality and user experience.
Digital economy and consumption upgrading bring demand for high service quality
He Baohong, the deputy director of the Institute of Technology and Standards of the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications, judged as early as January 2016 that the era of cloud computing 2.0 was coming. At that time, he judged that the focus of the cloud computing market began to shift from the public cloud market to the industrial cloud market. Cloud services for enterprises and industries were emerging, and the cloud computing market pattern would be rebuilt. Of course, there is no doubt that the industry cloud for enterprise users needs to improve the quality and guarantee of cloud services.
In 2017, the cloud computing industry is facing the dual pressure of the digital economy and consumption upgrading. In terms of consumption upgrading, personal consumption has become the main driving force of China's economic growth. The Economist Intelligence Unit predicts that its annual average real growth rate will remain at 5.5% from 2016 to 2030, and its share in the overall economy will be close to 50%. The growth of China's personal consumption in the next 15 years will be higher than the current total consumption of the EU.
The Economist Intelligence Unit predicts that by 2030, nearly 35% of China's population (480 million people) will meet the definition of high-income and high-income people. The Economist Intelligence Unit emphasizes that with the arrival of consumption upgrading, consumers in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and other provinces and cities will pay more attention to product and service quality while considering costs.
With the explosive development of the digital economy, cloud services will not only become the infrastructure for enterprise production, operation and management, but also indirectly provide consumers with products and services that can ultimately be consumed. In some industries, cloud services may even directly become part of the final products and services of enterprises. It is conceivable that under the premise of the dual requirements of enterprises and consumers, the demand for cloud services has gone from "nothing to something" to the stage of refinement and branding.
Taking smart cities as an example, at the end of November 2016, the AQSIQ and the National Standards Commission approved the issuance of 292 national standards, including the New Smart City Evaluation Indicators, and proposed eight indicators, including benefiting people services, precise governance, ecological livability, intelligent facilities, information resources, network security, reform and innovation, and citizen experience, of which citizen experience accounted for up to 20%, The weight is obviously greater than other items, only second to the benefit of people service. The intervention of AQSIQ is a clear signal that the requirements for information service quality have been put on the agenda.
Comprehensive upgrade of cloud service benchmark
In December 2016, China Electronics Technology Standardization Institute released the Cloud Computing Benchmark Database (Version 2) (V2.0). The V2.0 version is based on the V1.0 version launched by the Institute in 2014, which upgrades the cloud computing benchmark database. The updated content mainly includes: expanding the cloud product benchmark content, adding new content such as cloud resource monitoring; The cloud solution benchmark is divided into four levels, of which the enhancement level is mainly for operation and maintenance and operation capability; The leading level mainly involves intelligent operation and maintenance, cross cloud and audit.
V2.0 believes that cloud computing, as an important part of strategic emerging industries, is a major innovation in the information technology service model, and is of great significance to the implementation of Made in China 2025 and the "Internet+" action plan. The V2.0 version has enhanced the monitoring, security, and operation and maintenance of cloud resources and cloud solutions, which means that the security, stability, and reliability of cloud services are emphasized from the standard level.
According to the 2016 Research Report on China's Security Controllable Information Technology Applications and Best Practices (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") by www.csoft.com and Haibi Research, 65% of the surveyed enterprises have not or have not been on the cloud for the time being, which is mainly about performance and security, accounting for 80% and 70% of the respondents respectively. Frequent cloud service downtime events and security accidents still concern enterprises, because once an enterprise's business is deployed in the cloud, the lack of cloud service performance or security will cause great harm to enterprises.
The Report shows that the average satisfaction of domestic IaaS brands is lower than that of foreign IaaS brands. This is mainly because foreign IaaS service providers started early and had strong comprehensive technical strength. In addition, domestic enterprises helped them achieve localization as soon as possible, which made them gain certain advantages in the competition of user reputation. Specifically, the satisfaction of domestic IaaS service providers is Tencent Cloud 9.5, Huawei Cloud 8.7, Alibaba Cloud 7.9, Baidu Cloud 7.7, and the satisfaction of foreign IaaS service providers is Microsoft Azure 9.5 AWS9.1、 Gu Geyun 9.0 (full score: 10).
It is worth noting that although Tencent started relatively late in the field of cloud computing, due to the external output based on Tencent's own technical advantages and the daily test of Tencent applications by Shanghai users, Tencent Cloud has the highest service satisfaction. Tencent users who started with social networking are all over the world. At present, Tencent has been able to process more than 35 trillion pieces of platform data, about 30 billion pieces of instant messaging messages, and more than 2 billion pictures every day, bringing 400P basic data to Tencent, which can basically cover all aspects of people's lives, from social networking to payment. On this premise, Tencent Cloud will restore the scenes one by one, together with continuous adjustment and in-depth machine learning, to achieve the ability of high-quality cloud services.
BAT leads cloud service quality upgrade
Also from the survey of Hibiscus Research, BAT ranks among the top three in the survey of more promising IaaS service providers, and its market influence ability, technical strength, service ability, capital advantage and development momentum are all favored by enterprise users.
Although enterprises are more optimistic about domestic cloud service brands than foreign ones, which is largely due to China's independent and controllable policies and the country's strong support for local brands, in fact, BAT three have made a lot of R&D investment in cloud computing technology itself. In November 2016, Tencent Cloud's digital intelligence distributed computing platform won two championships in the Sort Benchmark global sorting contest, GraySort and Minutesort, and set four world records. In the same period, Alibaba Cloud won two world championships in CloudSort with a score of $1.44/TB, breaking the record of 4.51 $/TB set and maintained by AWS in 2014.
GraySort and Minutesort are competing for cloud computing performance, CloudSort is regarded as a competition for the efficiency of cloud computing, representing the different directions and international levels of Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud in cloud computing and big data. Although Tencent Cloud used 98.8 seconds to complete 100TB data sorting in the 2016 contest, breaking the 329 second record set by Alibaba Cloud in 2015 and the 716 second record set by Baidu earlier, this does not mean that Alibaba Cloud or Baidu Cloud has stopped making progress. In 2016, Baidu officially renamed the original Baidu Open Cloud "Baidu Cloud" and made a comprehensive strategic upgrade of its cloud computing brand. In particular, the comprehensive opening of Baidu's three major intelligent platforms to cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies directly improved brand awareness.
2016 can be said to be a catch-up rhythm among the three cloud service providers of BAT. Taking AI as an example, Alibaba Cloud launched Alibaba Cloud's AI brain "ET" in August 2016, which is an upgrade from Alibaba Cloud's AI mini Ai launched in April 2016. In November 2016, Baidu Unmanned Vehicles again appeared at the World Internet Conference. By December 2016, Tencent Cloud also announced the launch of seven AI services, including face detection, facial features positioning, face comparison and verification, face retrieval, image tags, ID card OCR recognition, business card OCR recognition, etc.
The overseas market is another position Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud are currently competing for. On November 21, 2016, Alibaba Cloud announced in Dubai that its data centers in Europe, the Middle East, Japan and Australia will open in succession within the month. At that time, Alibaba Cloud's computing nodes will include six domestic data centers and 14 global service nodes in Hong Kong, Singapore, the eastern United States, the western United States, Japan, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. On December 9, 2016, Tencent Cloud also announced that it would open 11 more overseas service nodes this month. In addition to the existing five domestic data centers, Tencent Cloud has a total of 19 global service nodes.
Looking forward to 2017, The battle among the three BAT players in the field of cloud computing will continue. For enterprises and consumers, the benefit is that the three will constantly improve their cloud service quality in the process of competition, which is undoubtedly a good factor to promote the digital economy and consumption upgrading. It can be said that an era of cloud computing brand with product quality and user experience as the core is coming.
