Cloud computing in the second half of the competition for the flow, what does the breakthrough rely on?

As cloud computing has become the underlying core technology of the foundation of new infrastructure and continues to penetrate into all walks of life, the development of domestic cloud computing has ushered in the second half, is entering a new cycle, and there are significant changes in the market pattern and industrial order. In particular, the accelerated rise of the "operator cloud" is eye-catching.

After all three major operator cloud companies were shortlisted by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission to create a world-class "double demonstration" action, releasing a signal that the state continues to encourage and support the growth of the national cloud computing team, from the relevant financial report data for 2022 recently released by China Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile, the development trend of "operator cloud is ushering in spring" has been confirmed again. According to various financial reports, Unicom Cloud's revenue was 36.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 121%; Tianyi Cloud's revenue was 57.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 107.5%; Mobile cloud revenue reached RMB50.3 billion, a year-on-year increase of 108.1%, achieving triple-digit growth for three consecutive years. From the perspective of financial reporting fundamentals, the revenue of operators' cloud business has achieved substantial growth or even doubled, occupying an important part of the growth curve of the three major operators.

Taking the latest China Mobile financial report of the three operators as an example, behind the eye-catching data, continuous growth momentum, and stronger anti-risk ability is actually reflected in its group-level determination and strength to "build the 'second curve' of digital transformation revenue growth". According to the financial report, China Mobile's digital transformation revenue reached 207.6 billion yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 30.3%, becoming the biggest driving force for the growth of China Mobile's business. It is particularly noteworthy that as the main entrance of China Mobile's cloud-related business and an important undertaking of digital business, mobile cloud accounts for 24.2% of China Mobile's digital business revenue, which can be called the mainstay of digital business revenue.

Looking further, it is not difficult to find that since China Mobile launched the "cloud reform" strategy, mobile cloud has been set as the most important strategic business, and the rising star status has "all the way" within three years, and the share of public cloud revenue has entered the top six in the domestic industry, the exclusive cloud ranks third, and the edge cloud ranks first... Rank among the "first camp of cloud service providers" with strength.

So, what's the problem? In the second half of the competition, when cloud vendors adjust their strategies to seek transformation, many Internet cloud vendors gradually "slow down and seek stability", and the top cloud giants and mid-waist players are still fiercely competitive, how can mobile cloud maintain continuous growth momentum and achieve the "small goal" of "first-class cloud service providers" in this "gladiatorial battle"?

In the face of the complex and changeable external competition situation, this is undoubtedly a protracted battle for comprehensive strength, from the planning of resources, the grasp of the market pattern, to the tackling of key technologies, the creation of industrial chain value, will be the key to affect the "score". In this regard, let's take a brief analysis.

Great power engineering traction -

Leapfrogging upgrade of the computing network layout is essential

Under the main line of the "Digital China" plan, cloud computing is moving towards a new pattern of "one network of national computing power" regulated by the government. Due to the need for "cloud-network convergence", operators with network resource advantages naturally become the main force of "building clouds for the country", and provide network resources and computing power resources to the society by establishing and improving the cloud-network integrated operation system.

But "building clouds for the country" is not just a slogan to clear your throat, but requires a strong core as a support. According to previous official releases, mobile cloud starts from architecture, resources, capabilities and other aspects to accelerate the formation of differentiated advantages of computing-network integration, including proposing a "large-wide-integration" technical architecture plan to promote the development of cloud-network collaboration to cloud-network integration. Strengthen resource investment, put into production more than 710,000 cloud servers, a net increase of more than 230,000 units, and continuously optimize the "4+N+31+X" intensive echelon layout, and since 2022, 8 3AZ high-quality resource pools have been successively released in the four hot economic zones of the Yangtze River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Greater Bay Area, and Shaanxi, Sichuan-Chongqing, ranking first in the industry in terms of one-point access resource richness.

Of course, the layout of resources to the user side ultimately depends on products and services to bridge. For example, last month, China Mobile successfully built the first 5G ultra-high-definition interactive video computing power center in Inner Mongolia, as the largest GPU heterogeneous computing power resource pool of mobile cloud nodes, which will be able to meet application scenarios such as large data volume forwarding, artificial intelligence, and image rendering, and achieve focused service low latency and high bandwidth requirements. For another example, Mobile Cloud Innovation launched 8 new products for cloud-network integration, covering more than 300 cities in 31 provinces. In addition, with the release of "Computing Network Service 1.0", Mobile Cloud further builds a computing power service system covering the network, edge, and device, opening a new era of transformation from cloud services to "task-based" new computing network service capabilities.

Changes in the market landscape——

Strive for the government and enterprise market, from the first mover to the "lead"

In the second half, large government and enterprise customers in the cloud market have become a new growth point. According to the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the scale of the mainland government cloud market will reach 120.39 billion yuan in 2023, with great potential.

When government and enterprise large customers become the new competition point, for cloud computing vendors, who can dig this gold mine means who is more likely to rewrite the competition pattern of cloud computing in the second half.

On the one hand, it traces back to the essence of cloud computing.

Its core is to provide customers with flexible computing power resource services, reduce costs and increase efficiency, which requires cloud vendors to have a large number of IT infrastructure and high collaborative scheduling capabilities in order to achieve a significant reduction in marginal costs based on scale effects and high resource utilization. At this level, mobile cloud can be said to have the blessing of "innate endowment", that is, cloud-network integration (network integration), cloud-edge collaboration (edge), cloud-data integration (convergence), and cloud-intelligence integration (convergence).

An infrastructure layer, backed by China Mobile's mobile cloud, has the advantages of strong network basic resources such as optical network broadband, mobile Internet, and satellite communication covering the whole country. As of the data released in this financial report, China Mobile will invest a total of 96 billion yuan in 5G networks in 2022, with a total of 1.285 million 5G base stations opened, 467,000 IDC racks available to the outside world, a net increase of 60,000 racks, and computer room cabinet resources throughout 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions across the country. These figures mean that under the "4+N+31+X" layout, especially the advantages of sustainable and rapid expansion of edge nodes, mobile cloud can realize agile connection and scheduling of resource allocation in hotspot areas, central nodes, provincial and municipal nodes, and edge nodes, coordinated development of cloud and network edge, further improve the scale of diversified computing power resources, intelligent connection between computing and network, and take localized management capabilities to a higher level, bringing business characteristics and flexibility that are difficult for other cloud service providers to match. Following China Mobile's "Wisdom Integration" strategy, the precipitation and output of mobile cloud in artificial intelligence, blockchain, precise positioning and other capabilities also lays the foundation for it to build intelligent solutions in the fields of government affairs, finance, and transportation, and improve the level of integration and empowerment.

On the other hand, focus on the government cloud itself.

In addition to the above-mentioned service strength and budget control, government and enterprise customers have special characteristics, they are highly sensitive to compliance requirements and data, and the security defense line is particularly valued, which becomes a boundary competition barrier. In this regard, the mobile cloud is also "prepared". Regardless of the unique advantages of the state-owned background, the security quality and level of its cloud services have also been recognized by the industry. Trusted cloud service evaluation is an authoritative evaluation system for the credibility of cloud computing services, the latest data shows that in addition to the national information security level protection three-level certification of all nodes, 63 trusted cloud qualification certifications and 7 best practices have been included.

Taking customer service as an example, under the complex and ever-changing international situation, the transformation of information innovation represented by central state-owned enterprises has become a general trend. With carrier-grade security service capabilities, mobile cloud has highlighted its competitiveness in the field of government and enterprise customers, and has built 4 national ministerial platforms and more than half of the provincial government clouds in China. As of December last year, its state-owned enterprises had more than 3,700 cloud projects. Among them, the national government service cloud platform built on mobile cloud directly connects 46 State Council departments and opens up more than 5 million service matters in 31 provinces.

As mentioned above, compared with cloud vendors such as the Internet, mobile cloud, which has state-owned enterprise qualifications, abundant channel resources, refined customer management, and more voice in security, has a mature cloud service model in the subdivision of government cloud, and has obvious first-mover advantages. Coupled with the high-intensity demand and multi-party emphasis on the digital transformation of government affairs in the context of "Digital China", it can be said that the future development space of mobile cloud in the government cloud market is still extremely broad.

Xinchuang continues to be positive——

Tackling the technical highland is the foundation of standing

Behind the large-scale cloud migration of the government and enterprise market to the higher demand for "security" and the continuous improvement of information and innovation industry policies, in the final analysis, there are still high requirements for "independent and controllable technology". In particular, at this stage, the focus of competition in the cloud industry has shifted from large-scale competition in the past to intensive cultivation at the bottom of the technology and deep in the industry. Therefore, twisting the "bull's nose" of key technology research, helping countries and enterprises solve the "stuck neck" problem, and creating a "new highland" for key core technology research in network security is a major theme and new challenge for cloud vendors in 2023.

As one of the few cloud service providers in China that can achieve independent and controllable core technologies, the technology and product innovation data released by China Mobile Cloud officially shows that it has 218 patents, won 40+ domestic and foreign awards and honors, and led or participated in the formulation of 25 national and industry standards.

Among them, the big cloud operating system independently developed by Mobile Cloud has successfully broken through the monopoly of foreign commercial software, supported compatibility and mutual recognition with 6 major CPUs, and realized the independent control and originality of key core technologies such as customized servers, virtualization, big data and cloud management platforms. With the advantages of ultra-high performance, stable and easy to use, cost-intensive, safe and reliable, the system was selected as the leading technology list of "Science and Technology Innovation China" in 2022.

Based on the "big cloud" technology foundation, mobile cloud carries out technological innovation and transformation, builds full-stack product self-research capabilities, continuously expands security boundaries, and launches more than 230 products covering cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and so on. The second-generation Big Cloud Rock server network throughput is increased by 100%, the forwarding performance is increased by 3 times, the fourth-generation cloud host packet forwarding rate is 30 million pps, the domestic TOP2, the computing power of the whole machine is increased by 46%, and the cloud disk achieves millions of IOPS and storage capacity is increased by 50 times... The performance indicators are industry-leading, and the digital empowerment capability continues to deepen.

Industrial chain value upgrading——

The key is to truly "go wide"

With the blessing of the "East Data and West Calculation" policy and backed by large government and enterprise customers, the best era seems to have arrived for operator cloud. However, if we want to fight the cloud computing market, carry out benign cloud ecological construction, open up the ecological chain, and broaden the ecosystem, we can truly "go wide".

At present, the operator Sanduo Cloud is actively exploring strategic transformation, giving full play to its comprehensive operation service capabilities, and striving to penetrate into all aspects of ecological construction. Since the implementation of the "cloud transformation" strategy, mobile cloud has always attached great importance to the creation of a "high-quality ecosystem", and made concerted efforts in technology ecology, market ecology and information innovation ecology.

The underlying logic of ecology is win-win symbiosis. In terms of technology ecology, with the help of the developer community platform, Mobile Cloud has built a "sharing model" of high-quality resources such as technology, resources, and talents through measures such as the "Mobile Cloud Cup" computing power network application innovation competition and holding technology salons, breaking barriers and helping developers accelerate technology monetization. It is understood that the mobile cloud developer community has gathered more than 260,000 developer users at home and abroad, and has held nearly 100 activities in total, helping 50,000+ developers achieve technological innovation. In addition, in order to forge a full-process innovation incubation chain and create an industry development model for the integration of industry and innovation, Mobile Cloud has established an industrial ecological incubation center, which consists of Hechuang Space, Hechuang Incubator, and Hechuang Accelerator to form a comprehensive incubation system.

In the new era, the symbiotic and co-prosperous cloud ecosystem will eventually fall back to the market and business value level, benefit partners, and realize a closed-loop cloud ecosystem for business.

Since 2019, Mobile Cloud has continuously upgraded its diverse SaaS application ecosystem: from the "Cloud Boat Plan", "Thousand Sails Action" to the "Vientiane Plan", launched a series of forward-looking open and win-win policies and preferred shopping malls and other operation and promotion systems, cooperated with nearly 100 leading industry solution manufacturers in 17 fields, shared ecological resources, introduced more than 1,000 high-quality partners, gathered 2,700+ SaaS products, and created a batch of tens of millions of revenue-generating products. According to mobile cloud experts, by tapping market demand and creating market space, the platform ecological value of the mobile cloud open cloud market has now reached tens of billions.

In terms of the information and innovation ecosystem, mobile cloud penetrates into multiple industries, and jointly builds a vertical and horizontal information innovation ecosystem by uniting industry partners and many domestic software and hardware manufacturers. At this stage, it has been initially built into a "multi-core, full-stack autonomous, secure and credible, and ecologically rich" information and innovation cloud capability base, laying the foundation for deeply tapping the potential of "localization" and promoting independent controllability and information security of IT products and technologies.

In 2023, with the landing of the "East Data and West Computing" project, the continuous acceleration of the cloud migration process of enterprises, and the high-quality development of the digital economy, and the AI industry represented by the popular ChatGPT recently provides the necessary computing power and even directly participates in the research and development of AI algorithms, the development of cloud computing will usher in a golden period, and the breakthrough of government and enterprise subdivisions will be more obvious. For the contenders, there are also more diverse challenges.

Through this financial report, more industry insiders expressed confidence in the operator cloud represented by mobile cloud, "cloud computing alone valuation may bring hundreds of billions of yuan of market value flexibility to operators." As China Mobile's key infrastructure and strategic main channel business, mobile cloud, which continues to lead the three-year revenue growth rate, is also expected to make more possibilities in reconstructing the industrial structure and order.