Baidu's new battlefield

Text | Lu Jiu Finance

Shen Jian wants to lead Baidu Intelligent Cloud to win the battle, I am afraid that I can't avoid the three mountains of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and HUAWEI CLOUD, but there are not many opportunities left for Baidu.

This May Day holiday may not be calm for Shen Shiver.

Factors such as the promotion of digital transformation in various industries, the impact of the epidemic and the launch of the national "East Counting West Calculation" project have made cloud services more and more demanded and received more attention. But even if you only look at China, the competition for cloud services is already very fierce, with Alibaba Cloud ranking first, Followed by Tencent Cloud and HUAWEI CLOUD, and Baidu ranking fourth.

Shen Jitter wants to lead Baidu Intelligent Cloud to win the battle, and I am afraid that it is impossible to avoid the three mountains of Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and HUAWEI CLOUD.

Fast-rising Baidu Smart Cloud

From the peak to the trough, the people's hearts were spurned by tens of thousands of people, and later they tried to practice their internal skills on the salary, and finally opened the "second spring".

In addition, Canalys' statistics also show that Baidu Smart Cloud is the only cloud vendor to achieve continuous positive growth every quarter in 2021.

Because of Robin Li's "new wine in old bottles" at the China IT Leaders Summit in 2010, people often can't do without a similar argument when evaluating the rapid growth of Baidu's intelligent cloud in later times.

This statement is not actually accurate.

With the development of technology and application scenarios, cloud computing is no longer a simple demand for storage capacity and computing power, but through the integration and innovation of a new generation of information technology such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and the real economy, together to provide technical services for enterprises. This makes Baidu, which has been deeply involved in AI and other technologies for more than ten years, have a greater advantage.

With more than ten years of accumulation, Baidu has the full deployment of technologies and platforms required for a new generation of cloud services, from basic computing power and data technologies, deep learning algorithms and frameworks, to perception and cognitive technologies such as speech, vision, and natural language processing, as well as flying propeller deep learning open source open platform.

Therefore, on this basis, Baidu Intelligent Cloud took the lead in the industry to put forward the concept of cloud-intelligence integration, that is, when designing AI-related programs, the cloud environment is taken into account, so as to achieve the cloud to provide more flexible computing power support for AI scenarios, and can cover more application scenarios more accurately.

The strategy of "cloud-to-intelligence integration" has its unique appeal when AI technology is applied by more industries. Mr. Zhao, an industry analyst, told Lujiu Finance: "The AI technology of each cloud service manufacturer can only rely on its own cloud service technology. Baidu's AI (technology) is really something. ”

The task of shen shaking is arduous

However, When Robin Li put Shen Shu in this position, he did not let him sit back and enjoy his success. "Shen Ji is a general, he should be in the position of leading the battle, this time to manage the ACG, this is what it means." People close to Baidu said.

The reason for this is that according to Canalys data, the "Four Clouds of China" composed of Alibaba Cloud, HUAWEI CLOUD, Tencent Cloud and Baidu Intelligent Cloud occupy 80% of China's cloud computing market, of which Alibaba Cloud has a market share of 37%, HUAWEI CLOUD has a market share of 18%, and Tencent Cloud has a market share of 16%.

Faced with three mountains and arduous tasks, what role can Shen Shu play? Baidu listed three shen jigs responsible for the possible impact of ACG for LuJiu Finance:

- ACG is independently responsible for by Shen Ji, which means that Baidu attaches importance to and strengthens investment in intelligent cloud business.

- As the company's second growth curve, Baidu Intelligent Cloud needs to change from quantitative to qualitative change in scale and health. Shen Ji's strong technical background and past sales system management ability can obviously help it.

According to the above conclusions, can Baidu intelligent cloud develop in the track of "AI services" by misplaced development, avoiding the positive competition with the "three mountains" in the field of basic cloud services? Mr. Zhao believes that not necessarily. "For users, the most important indicator should be the price/performance ratio. Cloud services are still homogeneous in most scenarios, and everyone is grabbing the market, so cloud services are in the inner volume. But by now, accessing AI services to the cloud may be a new trend."

If Mr. Zhao's judgment is correct, it will give Shen Ji a good news and a difficult problem. The good news is that Baidu's smart cloud is not much different from people's traditional impression of "forerunners" and can acquire customers through AI services. The challenge is how to achieve "healthiness," i.e. breakeven or profitability.

No matter what, shen shudder this battle is not easy to fight.

For Shen Ji and Baidu Intelligent Cloud, the best opportunity is to seize the rapid development period of the industry in China, continue to polish the advantages of technology, and make the advantages more prominent.

First of all, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the development of China's digital economy, and the period of rapid development is still continuing. In China, the penetration rate of the digital economy of the three major industries is significantly lower than that of developed countries. Statistics from the White Paper on the Global Digital Economy released by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology show that the digital economy of Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States accounted for more than 60% of GDP in 2019. China's digital economy accounted for 36.2% in 2019 and rose to 38.6% in 2020.

This is an opportunity for Baidu, and an opportunity shared by all manufacturers in the entire industry.

Secondly, the biggest advantage of Baidu Intelligent Cloud is still in AI technology.

IDC reports that around the world, companies or organizations are increasingly demanding AI infrastructure, and the construction of AI infrastructure is one of the most important decisions that affect the future development of companies, but it is also the most immature; data processing is still their biggest burden.

At present, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has leading products, technologies and solutions in the fields of intelligent manufacturing, smart energy, smart finance, and smart cities; its Kaiwu Industrial Internet platform has established cooperation with more than 300 benchmarking enterprises in more than 22 industries such as automotive, electronics, energy and power, equipment manufacturing, steel, chemical industry, and water affairs, providing services for more than 180,000 industrial enterprises, and deeply landing in 16 regions such as Guiyang, Chongqing, Tongxiang, Suzhou, Guangzhou, and Ningbo.

There are actually many opportunities left for Baidu, but it may be that long-distance running has only just begun.