Written by / Zheng Yahong
Editor / Zhao Yanqiu
At the end of 2018, a hot business in Alibaba and Huawei was also upgraded by Robin Li.
Robin Li announced in an internal letter at the time that Baidu had upgraded its cloud business. At this time, Baidu positioned the cloud outside of search, a business that could achieve rapid growth and support the company's business scale.
However, after less than a year of "testing the waters", Baidu has recognized the other side of the cloud, which requires huge investment to compete for who has more mines at home. Therefore, from the second half of 2019, Baidu began to adjust this business.
Three reactions to the departure of a general manager
The change in Baidu's cloud business has attracted attention from the fact that the general manager of the business, Yin Shiming, was exposed to leave. His personal departure has also sparked three conjectures and discussions in the industry.
A cloud computing industry source said that he had not dealt with Yin Shiming, but from the company's point of view, Baidu's monetization pressure was too great, and the cloud business could not become a profit point in the short term, and could only re-locate and resign.
Another person, who had reservations about the speculation, told AI Finance that Yin Shiming's departure was not necessarily due to performance. Yin Shiming is a person recruited by Zhang Yaqin, the former president of Baidu, and is Zhang's concubine. After Zhang retired from Baidu, the intelligent cloud business group led by Yin Shiming was integrated with the CTO system, and Yin reported to CTO Wang Haifeng. The issue of integration has been speculated, although Yin said to the outside world that "he embraces integration".
Photo/Visual China
Another executive of a leading cloud computing vendor simply said that the existence of Baidu Cloud is not strong, and many people do not know who the general manager of Baidu Cloud is.
In fact, in 2016, Yin Shiming was recruited to Baidu, and he was mainly responsible for baidu cloud business for the next three years. Unlike Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, which are currently led by people with Internet to C backgrounds, Yin Shiming was the senior vice president of large enterprise software SAP in Greater China, with a to B key customer sales background. It can also be judged from this that Baidu found Yin Shiming in the hope that he could make a difference in the market of to B major customers.
In 2017, Yin Shiming said in an interview with AI Finance and Economics that Baidu Cloud went a little late, but it can also think more thoroughly. He admitted that in the process of Baidu Cloud's forward development, there must be many challenges, such as Baidu is a to C company, and now it is necessary to gradually establish more to B thinking.
Nowadays, some people in the cloud industry have bluntly said to AI Finance and Economics that the cloud business of Internet companies is usually started by people who are to C, and then people who are to B take over, "Baidu seems to be reversed."
However, several Baidu Cloud insiders said that Yin Shiming's reputation is good, he is a professional professional manager, "frank", "the words said can basically be confirmed", "he has strong management ability, said that there is a result of 3 months of adjustment, then it can indeed be achieved."
However, some Baidu employees anonymously questioned Yin Shiming's ability to work on the pulse: "Waston (Yin Shiming) has been here for two years, in addition to adjusting the structure, I don't know what I'm doing, and I haven't seen several battles won." Did anyone tell me where the Waston cattle were? ”
As a sniper in Baidu's cloud business in the past three years, Yin Shiming's departure news is slightly calm. In fact, the bullets have been flying for a long time.
In March this year, Baidu announced through internal email that Baidu's intelligent cloud business group would be adjusted, in which Yin Shiming and Zhang Zhiqi stepped down from their original posts and made other arrangements.
Baidu cloud insiders said that for executives at Yin Shiming's level, Baidu will not announce it like Lu Qi and Zhang Yaqin left, and it is through such internal emails that it announces its adjustment and departure. However, due to the impact of the epidemic at that time, the news of this internal adjustment was not paid attention to by the outside world. It wasn't until the recent news of the new career news of "Yin Shiming Meets Investors" that people realized that the executive had left.
At the same time, the adjustment of Baidu Cloud has been gradually carried out since Zhang Yaqin left. In the era of Zhang Yaqin, the status of Baidu Cloud was on the rise. Baidu has been "all in AI" in the past few years, although Robin Li has clarified that he did not say so, but it is undeniable that Baidu's prominent label in recent years is "artificial intelligence". Baidu Cloud, Baidu Brain and other teams are working hard to undertake the task of artificial intelligence landing. At the end of 2018, the original Intelligent Cloud Division was upgraded to an Intelligent Cloud Business Group.
After Zhang Yaqin retired, Baidu made a series of adjustments around the technology system, and the status of the cloud business can be regarded as a downward shift to some extent. First, in September 2019, the intelligent cloud was integrated with the CTO system, and Yin Shiming and his team reported to the CTO Wang Haifeng. Wang Haifeng's CTO system mainly consists of two pieces, the AI technology platform system and the basic technology system, and the three systems after the integration were integrated into the "Baidu Artificial Intelligence System" in January this year.
"Zhang Yaqin's departure is an important factor for Yin Shiming's departure, but it is not a core issue." An industry insider analyzed ai finance and economics and said, "The core is still performance, and Yin Shiming has not completed the operating indicators." "In his opinion, Yin Shiming's 2,000-person team was incorporated into the CTO system in September last year in preparation for his departure." Yin may have known in his heart at that time that this was a smooth transition. ”
The above-mentioned people believe that Baidu Cloud has changed from reporting directly to the president to reporting to the CTO, which is a downgrade, but it will not be canceled.
Search why companies don't do well in the cloud
As a veteran Internet company, many industry insiders believe that this series of adjustments reflects Baidu's lack of strategic determination on the cloud. "There is no right direction or no right, it will be good to do it to the extreme."
However, some people believe that "cloud computing is a new species of heavy assets and scale, and it requires very large funds to land", and the industry has become more and more prominent in the attributes of giant monopoly, Baidu is no longer desperate after weighing, to some extent, it is also a recognition of the current reality.
"Each cloud business has a different positioning and has its own way of living. For example, Kingsoft Cloud first guarantees the thunder business, and Meituan Cloud protects itself. One person said.
Baidu's situation in cloud computing is easily reminiscent of another international search giant, Google. Coincidentally, Google's cloud business is also not going well, lagging behind Amazon and Microsoft. In 2019, Google disclosed the revenue of the cloud business for the first time, which was $8.92 billion for the whole year, compared with Amazon AWS's full-year revenue of $35.026 billion and Microsoft Cloud's $11.9 billion.
In mid-April, foreign media revealed that Google Cloud may cut spending and lay off employees. In a letter to employees, Google CEO Pichai said the company would "recalibrate" its investment focus and pace of investment in areas such as data centers due to the covid-19 pandemic.
Compared with Baidu's domestic face of Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei, their plight is similar.
IDC analyst Liu Lihui believes that companies like Amazon and Ali that started with e-commerce will encounter such a big promotion activity as "Double Eleven", in order to support peak traffic, more servers should be prepared, which has caused the usual idle equipment. A person from a leading cloud computing company said more specifically that the peak traffic is a hundred times that of usual. In order not to waste the resources they have already invested, their motivation to do the cloud is itself very large. Search companies, on the other hand, don't have this problem.
In addition, there is no "strong association" between the search company and its customers, which is also a constraint on the development of the cloud business of the two search companies.
"Alibaba is based on the Wanwang and Jushi Tower system, which has been able to open the mouth of service enterprises, and thus gathered the early customers of Alibaba Cloud; Not to mention Huawei, which has been doing to B, large governments and enterprises eat very dead; Tencent has a game ecology." But I can't see where Baidu's biosphere is. A person in the cloud industry said.
In that year, Ali acquired wanwang for website domain name filing, enterprises want to build a website, first have to buy a domain name, Aliyun will cut in from here, and strive for the website to be hosted on Alibaba Cloud; and the boulder tower is a set of systems for Taobao sellers, sellers build online stores based on it, and online stores naturally go to Alibaba Cloud. But in search companies, it's hard to see such a natural extension. In the past two years, Baidu has pushed mini programs and launched hosting pages at the same time to help Baidu advertisers do marketing landing pages, all of which are expected to leave the circle of their own traffic.
Unlike Baidu, Google Cloud has a strong software business, which makes it still the third oldest in the global cloud computing market.
A cloud business analyst observed that in 2018, Google Cloud's software business (PaaS and SaaS services) generated billions of dollars in revenue on various cloud platforms, and in 2019, the two businesses grew strongly. The software services of Baidu Cloud are not prominent enough, and the domestic PaaS and SaaS have not yet ushered in a large-scale outbreak, which is about 3 years behind, which also makes Baidu want to copy Google's experience at the moment.
In fact, the adjustment of Baidu's cloud business is still in progress. Relevant people told AI Finance and Economics that the architecture adjustment is to be more conducive to the landing of AI, and Zhang Yaqin first summarized the "ABC strategy" (artificial intelligence AI, big data Big Data Bigdata, cloud Cloud) for cloud business, and now it should also be an iteration on the basis of ABC.
Who is Baidu Cloud's second iQiyi?
Baidu Cloud's biggest customer at present is iQIYI, which is looking for a "second iQiyi".
In the external information of Baidu Intelligent Cloud, baidu said that at present, Baidu attaches more importance to value sales, and attaches more importance to industry solutions and AI "value landing". That is to say, those cloud businesses that "lose money and make money" and only do scale will be abandoned, and the industry landing solution is the direction.
Before the Spring Festival this year, Baidu Intelligent Cloud announced a round of adjustments, in which the four major business sectors of smart government, smart medical, smart finance, smart customer service and marketing were upgraded to four major business units, and the four main tracks were also determined.
Baidu chooses these four main tracks, some are based on previous accumulation, and some are expected by the market in the future, but the hot track means that the challenge is also greater.
Smart medical Baidu currently has some phased achievements, including ai fundus screening all-in-one machine that Robin Li personally demonstrated at the conference, as well as AI body temperature measurement, AI phone and other projects during the epidemic. But in fact, the landing of the entire AI industry in medical treatment has not been smooth, the issuance of three types of medical device certificates has not been issued, and many AI medical companies can only find another way to create revenue from other models. However, the new crown epidemic has torn open a hole for AI medical treatment, and there will be more opportunities and competition in the follow-up.
Intelligent customer service and marketing is currently a relatively mature part of Baidu Cloud's business, and Baidu's landing in the telecom operator market is relatively smooth. It is difficult for the outside world to imagine that the three major operators will invest tens of billions of yuan in the customer service business. Replacing manual calls with AI to reduce costs for operators is a considerable market.
Smart finance is also a relatively mature business. Baidu starts from the intelligent customer service system, and the target customers are major banks and financial institutions, all of which are not bad money. Baidu's cooperation model is generally to package AI capabilities with private clouds or industry clouds. The earliest bank speech recognition system used iFLYTEK or Niuansi, and proposed that the later dialogue system use Baidu. However, in actual use, it was found that the combination of the two systems was not effective, and the correct rate of semantic understanding was greatly reduced by only 80%, and finally a complete set of Baidu solutions was selected. Baidu extends and expands the financial scene here.
Government affairs is the most fiercely contested market for cloud computing vendors in 2019, and from time to time it is revealed which cloud vendor has obtained hundreds of millions of yuan in large orders. However, industry insiders analyze that the government affairs market is now an era of division of land, and manufacturers take orders according to geographical advantages. Inspur is based in Shandong, Tencent occupies Guangdong, Ali covers Zhejiang, and the rest of the provinces are also rapidly divided and cannibalized by major factories. Baidu needs to choose a good site and focus on breakthroughs.
Obviously, the focus of Baidu Intelligent Cloud is to focus on the main track and monetize AI through the cloud, but it can be confirmed that the monetization speed of artificial intelligence will not be fast.
Last year, Baidu proposed that AI enter the stage of industrial large-scale production, which is also a matter that all cloud vendors around the world are implementing. An industry insider said that Huawei's approach is very representative, one end starts from the underlying artificial intelligence chip, the other end starts from the upper-level algorithm research, and then the two sides work hard in the middle, one by one, to form an end-to-end solution. However, HUAWEI CLOUD related people also admitted to AI Finance and Economics that this is a fledgling thing that needs to be invested for several years.
The monetization of AI has not yet waited for the spring.
Previously, some people proposed on social media that after Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud, who will be the third oldest in China's public cloud market? Compare Baidu Cloud with HUAWEI CLOUD.
However, a number of cloud computing people told AI Finance and Economics that the two do not have much correlation, and the domestic future may be HAT (Huawei, Ali, Tencent) to do heavy investment, big competition. In the cloud market, enterprises have been investing for several years, and only Amazon AWS is currently profitable.
"After this adjustment, maybe Baidu will not do a large-scale cloud, and may do a cloud to help AI land on some selected tracks, and then depend on the development situation." One cloud computing person said, "This is not a good thing." ”