Amazon Cloud Zhang Wenyi: China is still in the early stages of cloud computing development, and will increase investment in 2022| Exploration 2022

Wenyi Zhang, Global Vice President of Amazon and Executive Director of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China

Titanium Media Note: "Exploring the Way 2022" is a year-end planning topic of Titanium Media, inviting TOP entrepreneurial leaders in various industries to review the industry changes and corporate growth in the past year, while talking about new logic and looking forward to 2022. This article is a conversation between Zhang Wenyi, Global Vice President of Amazon and Executive Director of Amazon Cloud Technology Greater China, in conversation with the Titanium Media App "Pathfinding 2022", the following is Zhang Wenyi's outlook for the future of the industry.

As a technology person and industry person, looking back on 2021, I think there are several keywords that have profoundly affected the development process and direction of the industry: "digitalization", "globalization" and "sustainability".

The first is "digitalization".

In 2021, the haze of the new crown epidemic has not dissipated, and the uncertainty of the epidemic still affects the development of all walks of life. This uncertainty has made more enterprises aware of the importance of digital transformation and reinvention, and has also accelerated their pace towards digitalization. Behind these digital transformations and remodeling, it is inseparable from the support of the cloud. With the three advantages of providing an innovative environment of "check-in", the high flexibility and effective cost reduction of "pay-as-you-go", and the reduction of the threshold for the use of new technologies, cloud computing has become an important driving engine for the innovative development of the new generation of digital economy. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, cloud computing is also defined as one of the seven key industries of the future digital economy, reflecting the important role of cloud computing as the "technical base" for the innovative development of the entire digital economy.

We see that all walks of life, all sizes, and all types of enterprises are accelerating "going to the cloud, using numbers, and empowering intelligence", and we are also exploring how to better use the cloud and the most cutting-edge technologies to accelerate the transformation and innovation of enterprises after going to the cloud.

For example, the entire automotive industry is moving towards electrification, networking, intelligence, and sharing. Automakers around the world are using our cloud services to innovate their businesses and even enter new tracks in terms of product design and innovation, connected vehicles and mobility, digital user experience, supply chain, and more. For example, Amazon Cloud Technology has helped Toyota establish a mobility services platform that collects, manages, and analyzes vehicle data accessed to the platform for the development of car travel services, such as car sharing, driving behavior-based insurance services, and vehicle maintenance notifications.

In the manufacturing industry, although China's manufacturing industry ranks first in the world in total, the scale of the digital economy ranks second, which shows that the proportion of digitalization in China's manufacturing industry still has great potential and space for development. There are many scenarios for the digitization and intelligence of manufacturing industry, such as digital engineering and design, efficient operation, smart factories, and connected products and services. In terms of promoting the digital and intelligent transformation of manufacturing enterprises, Amazon Cloud Technology has in-depth cooperation with many enterprises around the world, such as helping TCL establish an intelligent data lake on the cloud, opening up the "data islands" that exist between business lines in more than 160 countries and regions around the world, and helping TCL fully tap and use the value of data for digital transformation and innovation. By fully integrating operational data, TCL can efficiently run more than 190 jobs and generate more than 200 BI reports per day, and by fully connecting smart device data to the data lake, TCL has achieved data-driven business and product innovation, and the innovation efficiency has increased by more than 50%.

The second is "globalization".

In the past year, although the epidemic has brought many obstacles to global communication and exchanges, "globalization" is still an important direction for many enterprises to develop, and a technical infrastructure that can support the layout of global business layout is becoming a strategic issue that more and more enterprises are thinking about.

In the 2021 Fortune Global 500, 143 Chinese companies made the list. We also see a large number of Chinese brands moving towards globalization by going overseas. From the trend point of view, China's overseas enterprises are experiencing a transformation from labor-intensive and capital-intensive product exports to high-tech products and emerging business model output; from the earliest Internet tools to the sea, to cross-border e-commerce and games to the sea, to video and short video to the sea, and now more and more smart device manufacturers and even technology service providers to go to sea; from simple commodity exports, to the establishment of global brands. All this reflects that China's overseas expansion is expanding to an industry with higher profit margins, stronger branding and stronger scientific and technological power.

Amazon Cloud Technology has been actively responding to the country's strategy of opening up to the outside world, helping globalization and promoting "external circulation". We want to leverage our extensive global infrastructure coverage, leading security and compliance concepts, broad and deep cloud services, rich partner solutions, and Amazon's globally integrated resources to continue to empower these enterprises. For example, Chinese companies such as Anker Innovation, Hisense, Midea, OPPO, Tuya Intelligent, CIMC, and NetEase Games are using Amazon Cloud Technology to accelerate overseas business expansion.

On the other hand, data from the Ministry of Commerce shows that in 2020, China will absorb more foreign investment than the United States, becoming the world's largest inflow of foreign capital. 98% of the Fortune Global 500 invest in China. At the same time, the introduction or revision of more and more policies and regulations in China has also released a positive signal to promote the further investment and development of multinational enterprises in China.

Millions of customers around the world are already transforming to the cloud through Amazon Cloud Technology and establishing a sound cloud technology architecture. When they enter China to grow their business, Amazon Cloud Technologies' globally integrated team and globally consistent technology architecture can bring the best experience to multinational enterprises. At the same time, Amazon Cloud Technology has industry-leading security compliance concepts, practices and services, which can easily solve the concerns and concerns of customers in terms of security compliance. Amazon Cloud Technology has naturally become the best choice for them to develop in China. For example, Siemens, Schneider, Toyota Interconnection, Pfizer, Bayer, and Unilever are all accelerating business landing and local innovation through Amazon Cloud Technology China.

Finally, "sustainable".

In the face of growing climate challenges, countries have set corresponding carbon neutrality targets. At the two sessions of the National People's Congress this year, the two goals of "carbon peaking" and "carbon neutrality" were also written into the government work report for the first time. I believe that the sustainable development of the digital economy should not only meet the long-term growth of the economy, but also actively respond to environmental challenges, which requires enterprises to make full use of innovative technologies and rationally formulate carbon neutral paths. It can be seen that "sustainable" has become the general trend of the future development of enterprises. In 2021, more and more companies are beginning to implement their commitment to sustainability.

Amazon wants to be a change agent driving sustainability, which is the vision of our founder, Bezos, and I very much agree with it, which is one of the goals that Amazon Cloud Technology strives for. Combining our resources and strengths, we have launched a series of initiatives.

We defined a shared responsibility model on the cloud, where Amazon Cloud Technologies is responsible for the sustainability of the cloud itself, and customers need to establish a sustainable mindset and technical architecture.

For Amazon Cloud Technologies, our responsibility will be achieved by continuously improving the efficiency of data centers and the use of renewable energy. Our cloud data centers are 3.6 times more energy efficient than the average enterprise data center, running the same workload can reduce the carbon footprint of 80% compared to traditional on-premises data centers. The compute instances supported by our self-developed chip Graviton3 processor can also save up to 60% of energy consumption compared to the same type of instance. In terms of renewable energy, we have set a target to achieve 100% renewable energy in global infrastructure by 2025. Amazon is already one of the world's largest corporate buyers of renewable energy, and has announced two Amazon-backed renewable energy projects in China, including a solar project in Shandong and a wind project in Jilin Province.

For our customers, we think they can take responsibility for themselves in three ways. First, in terms of improving code efficiency, application architecture and data storage design, there should be a sustainable development mindset, and better technologies should be used to help achieve sustainable development, such as we encourage customers to adopt Amazon Cloud Technology's serverless serverless technology, with the help of serverless extreme scalability, to provide customers with the best resource utilization for customers' applications, thereby reducing energy consumption. Second, get guidance on sustainable software development with the sixth pillar of Amazon Cloud Technologies' Good Architecture Framework, Sustainability. Third, since Amazon Cloud Technology is also about to launch an Amazon Carbon Footprint Tool to monitor the carbon footprint of workloads in the cloud, and this tool will also predict how much carbon emissions will help customers' workloads reduce as Amazon's various renewable energy projects go live, we hope that customers can also take full advantage of this tool in the future.

Amazon is also driving more companies to join the ranks of sustainability. In 2019, Amazon released the Climate Declaration, which aims to achieve zero carbon emissions across all business lines by 2040, achieving the paris agreement 10 years ahead of schedule, with more than 200 companies around the world already joining. In addition, Amazon has established the Climate Pledge Fund, which plans to invest $2 billion to support other companies in creating sustainable products, services and technologies.

We also realize that we can't do without technical talent to achieve sustainable development goals, so we are also committed to helping the world cultivate cloud computing talent. In 2019, we announced that by 2025, we will invest hundreds of millions of dollars around the world to provide free cloud computing technology training to 29 million people in more than 200 countries and regions to help them improve their technical capabilities, and China is also in this plan.

Amazon Cloud Technology has always been committed to taking root in China, empowering customer remodeling, accelerating customer global business expansion, and strengthening local talent training, thereby promoting industry transformation, helping the development of the digital economy, and benefiting the whole society.

We hope that the cloud can empower more industries and solve more practical challenges. By going to the cloud, more people and more enterprises will also have the opportunity to empower others. We also hope that through our efforts, we can empower more innovation and help more customers find their way to reshape and become "pathfinders".

As a "pathfinder" in the field of cloud computing, Amazon Cloud Technology will continue to innovate and make breakthroughs in the coming year, and continue to launch industry-leading cloud computing technologies and services, making the cloud more flexible, more costly, lower latency, and wider coverage. We continue to reconfigure the cloud computing base to provide customers with the best price/performance ratio for different workloads; push the cloud to more edges through innovative technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, and satellite services; promote the seamless integration of data, analytics, and machine learning, and explore more powerful data solutions on the cloud to help customers drive business insights, decision-making, and success; and focus on industries to launch customized products and services in more vertical industries. Finally, we are investing heavily in improving the efficiency of infrastructure and cloud services to help our customers achieve their sustainability goals.

At the business level, we continue to take root in China, increase investment, and provide customers with better infrastructure; collaborate with Sinnet and NWCD to accelerate the landing of global cloud services and functions in China; integrate global and local rich customer practices to help traditional enterprises in all walks of life quickly embrace the cloud and drive the transformation of traditional industries; deeply cultivate the financial, manufacturing, automotive, retail and e-commerce, medical and life sciences, media, education, games, energy and power industries. Through Amazon Cloud Technology's rich experience in serving the end-to-end whole industry chain of various vertical industries, it accelerates the landing of overseas customers, the transformation and innovation of local customers in China, and the upgrading of local industries. Of course, we will continue to help Amazon cloud technology partners improve their business capabilities and technical level, enrich and enhance China's cloud industry chain, and better serve customers.

China is one of the most important countries in our global development layout, and we are full of confidence in the long-term development of China in the future. As a pioneer and leader in the global cloud computing industry, Amazon Cloud Technology will always firmly implement its long-term commitment to Chinese customers, better integrate into the local development system, participate in and promote China's digitalization process, and let the whole society benefit from the bright future brought by digitalization. (This article was first published on the Titanium Media App, the content is the first-person expression of the interviewee, editor/Qin Conghui)