Li Yanhong follows Ma Huateng closely to supervise cloud computing
Recently, Baidu released Baidu's open cloud strategy.
Although it is generally believed that Baidu's cloud computing business started late, Robin Li, Baidu's founder, who came to the scene that day, said otherwise: "In fact, Baidu has been a cloud company since the beginning, because search itself is a very typical cloud computing application."
Baidu launched Tiansuan, Tianxiang and Tiangong three intelligent platforms on the day of its open cloud strategy.
According to Liu Yang, general manager of Baidu Cloud Computing Business Unit, Tiansuan Wisdom provides services from data collection, storage, processing and analysis to application scenarios, which are applicable to life science, digital marketing, log analysis, financial credit reporting, intelligent customer service and other fields; Tianxiang Intelligent Multimedia Cloud Platform increases the user experience of media interaction through AI and big data technologies; Tiangong's intelligent Internet of Things platform provides a full stack of products from the SDK on the device side to access, protocol resolution, device management, storage, data, etc., so that enterprises can quickly build an Internet of Things application, and will focus on the industry, logistics, Internet of Vehicles, energy and retail O2O industries in the future.
"The three intelligent platforms and existing cloud services constitute the product matrix of Baidu Open Cloud", Liu Yang said that Baidu Open Cloud will rely on this to extend to 360 lines.
Baidu's cloud computing layout began in 2014. Baidu has been building private cloud internally before, and many technologies of Baidu's open cloud are also built on the basis of Baidu's private cloud. In 2014, Baidu opened a complete open cloud system including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and launched 13 products successively; In September of the same year, Baidu OpenCloud opened a test channel; However, registration was not opened to the public until April 7, 2015.
According to the China Internet Cloud Computing Report released by Deutsche Bank in April 2016, Baidu Cloud showed a slight momentum in the cloud computing industry, with 555000 active customers in the quarter last December, mostly SMEs.
According to the analysis of the report, Baidu is currently promoting a low-cost strategy for cloud products, hoping to encourage users to go to the cloud.
According to Baidu's public data, Baidu Cloud users are mostly concentrated in Baidu Alliance, in addition to Air China, Minsheng Bank, Taiyuan Railway Bureau and other companies. This pioneering plan launched with Intel also hopes to introduce more entrepreneurial customers.
As for Baidu's open cloud strategy, which was released only today, Robin Li believes that there are two aspects of great impact. First, economic growth cannot rely on cheap labor as before, and each enterprise must constantly improve its operational efficiency, and cloud computing applications can play a role in improving this efficiency; Second, cloud computing is no longer a simple cloud storage and demand for computing power, but a combination of big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
In Robin Li's opinion, these are Baidu's advantages. He said: "Baidu has the innovation of artificial intelligence technology, the ability to process data on a large scale, the ability to draw very accurate user portraits, and the ability to locate very well. All these capabilities combined can play a very unique role in various industries."
He described Baidu cloud computing as "the trinity of cloud computing+big data+artificial intelligence", which is different from traditional cloud computing.
Coincidentally, Ma Huateng also held a huge product recommendation meeting for Tencent Cloud in Qianhai, Shenzhen a few days ago. He spent nearly 30 minutes on the spot to introduce Tencent Cloud's planning, indicating that Tencent Cloud has become one of Tencent's most important businesses in the TOB field this year, and will focus on investment and do a good job.
In this regard, the starting time of Tencent and Baidu is not much different. In June last year, Tencent began to launch the "cloud+plan" to provide cloud services for start-ups. In the first half of this year, Tencent Cloud released 25 products, mainly in computing and networking, storage and CDN, database, security and other fields.
It is understood that the initial customers of Tencent Cloud are mainly concentrated in the video, game and mobile business fields, such as its subsidiaries and third-party customers such as 58 local and Didi.
A person who has business relations with Tencent Cloud told the interface news reporter: "Tencent Cloud is relatively expensive because it will be sold together with game distribution, and many game companies are basically inseparable from Tencent's distribution channels."
However, compared with Alibaba Cloud, which started business in 2009, Tencent and Baidu both started late.
Up to now, Alibaba Cloud has become a dominant player in China, except for Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc., which have not separately disclosed the situation of the Chinese market.
IDC research data shows that Alibaba Cloud has ranked first in China's public cloud market share since 2014, with a market share of 29.7%. Morgan Stanley estimated in its report in June this year that Alibaba Cloud's market share in China would reach 58% by the end of fiscal 2019. Recently, Barron Weekly cited the research report of investment agency Wedbush and also believed that Alibaba Cloud would become the cloud computing service provider comparable to Amazon AWS, which is now the world's largest cloud computing service provider.
According to Alibaba Cloud's internal employees, Alibaba Cloud's customers in the early years were more entrepreneurial. At this stage, it has expanded to central enterprises, traditional enterprises, multinational companies, etc.
According to the financial report, Alibaba Cloud's revenue in the first quarter of 2016 exceeded 1 billion yuan, up 175% year on year. In fiscal year 2016, Alibaba Cloud's annual revenue exceeded 3 billion yuan.
The above survey report of Deutsche Bank predicts that Alibaba Cloud's revenue will reach 67.7 billion yuan in 2019, close to the bank's forecast of Amazon's AWS revenue in 2016.
The report also predicted that Tencent's revenue from cloud computing services in 2015 was about 250 million yuan, and the proportion of Tencent Cloud in Tencent's total revenue would grow to 5.1% in 2019, while this figure was 0.2% in 2015.
However, Baidu has not yet appeared in these reports. Baidu has a long way to go in the future to open its cloud.
