"Cloud" reshaping the competitiveness of retail industry

Cloud + computing Represents the change of business model + technological progress. At present, more than 90% of the cloud platforms under construction are focused on the technical part, lack of research on the business model, which will lead to a large number of cloud platform to eventually fail. The real value of cloud computing is gradually being recognized, specialization, industry, regionalization is the main trend of cloud computing development.





"Cloud" as a new computing model and new business model, for the IT industry is of great significance, almost all the heavyweight it vendors are pouring in.





Cloud computing huge market scale beyond imagination, according to the Beijing "Xiangyun Project", Shanghai "cloud Plan" and the Ministry of Industry key demonstration of the development of the other three cities, IDC (International Data Company) is expected to 2015 national "cloud computing" industry chain scale may reach 750 billion to 1 trillion yuan.





Typically, the industry divides cloud computing into three different types of services: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS). For now, these three kinds of cloud services are developing very unevenly. Everywhere are frantically building cloud computing centers, so that the IaaS level of competition tends to white-hot. Relatively speaking, the technical threshold of IaaS is low, the development is mature, the space of future innovation and increment is limited, and many competitors ' heavily hoarding makes this part of profits and profit hard to be guaranteed.





in this case, it is time to change. The real value of cloud computing is "cloud business model and management model", will be to the business insight and professional ability to introduce cloud computing platform, set up the hundred of different industries, create industry cloud potential, is the main trend of cloud platform development. Cloud computing competition is not a simple iaas/data center model, but gradually rise to the industry, regional and business Professional Industry Alliance form. The market has emerged the cloud energy, the supply chain cloud Platform, the university education cloud and so on many gradually mature idea. We clearly see: The application platform has been from the original enterprise-built way into the industry or the region to build a model, and a lot of spark prairie. The future in an industry or a region, only the real business insight and operational capabilities of the cloud platform will be steady development, the competition in a few surviving cloud platform. The appearance of the cloud platform represents the transformation of "planned economy" to "market economy", and the key factor of success or failure is to build, share and customer demand.





Build Cloud Ecological





How to build a professional, industry, regional cloud platform, we start from the retail business. Over the past more than 10 years, China's retail industry has experienced the extensive rapid development of the enclosure from scratch and from small to large. Exploring a sustainable long-term growth model and looking for opportunities for transformation and development has become a difficult strategic problem for retail enterprises.





domestic famous chain retail Enterprise S company is also deeply troubled by the above problems. S company in the supply chain with home appliances as the core, upstream has production, distribution, transportation, downstream services, maintenance and other links, s company accounted for only the retail link, but only this one link for s company created annual turnover will be more than 200 billion yuan. For upstream suppliers and manufacturing enterprises, s company's every move will directly affect its operating efficiency. S company has the strength to influence the "industry alliance".




Although the
is large enough, s company still faces two difficult problems in its development: the enlargement of the staff, the hierarchy, the lower efficiency, the wider geographical range, the more dispersed resources, and the more satisfactory management benefit. A number of reasons for the company's physical stores and online store profitability has been significantly reduced, the need to crack the way.





2011, with the help of IBM GBS, s company has formulated the 3-year plan of "cloud computing strategy", proposed the development mode of building s Company's globalization sharing platform, transforming cloud service, and established and consolidated S Company's future dominance in industry and region by the way of "cloud alliance".





S Company's supply chain has a large number of business needs, such as the production process of raw material management, order management, distribution management, transport management. For the upstream large home appliances enterprises, they have a strong IT team, can build a strong IT system, but for small and medium-sized electrical appliances Enterprises, although they also have this demand, may not have enough energy, funds and personnel to build a relatively perfect IT system.





and S company has funds, with teams and it technology, they are fully capable of refining the common needs of the industry, creating a cloud platform that serves industry and region, attracting the participation of upstream and downstream enterprises, and attracting more participants to contribute to the cloud platform for the functional units in the production chain.





In addition, in the production of household electrical appliances retail chain, but also gradually integration of financial services, content services related industries, the impact of the scale will be further expanded. After the cloud platform attracts more third-party suppliers to enter the chain, s company can bundle and combine the products sold, such as the purchase of intelligent electronic electronic books and other similar promotional activities, on the basis of the original single product, resulting in other services.





through the cloud platform model, s company can gradually build a complete, rich, service to the broad masses of the cloud platform ecosystem, and continuously improve and optimize the function of the cloud platform to attract more customers and third parties in this environment to cooperate and operate, to produce a scale effect.





such platform construction is not an enterprise alone can complete the project, only joint appropriate "common builders", can achieve the industry cloud career, and promote its mature development.





three conditions, three elements, four stages to establish cloud platform




How should
cloud platform be built? IBM advises S company to work with local operators. Operators, as platform participants, use IaaS to carry the underlying foundation, providing communication services and computing capabilities. As the leader of Cloud platform, s company absorbs more participants and customers through its brand appeal and industry influence.





Currently, there are dozens of cloud computing bases all over the country, and some cloud computing centers have only more than 10 applications running on them. How to ensure the success of cloud platform construction?




The
cloud computing platform must meet at least 3 prerequisites:




Where there is
, there is a chance of cloud. S company's province, a large number of production, sales, transport-related enterprises, including large chain organizations, many small and medium-sized enterprises and government agencies, industry relative concentration and aggregation. These conditions are on the one hand the cloud platform commercial market safeguard, on the other hand also will the professional ability highly gathers.





there is a "chain" where there is cloud computing. S company has a long supply chain, each link has a lot of enterprises, they have logistics, information, financial services, the integration of development needs. Any enterprise is difficult to complete the whole chain of capacity-building, build and share the need to promote the development and maturity of the cloud platform.





Where there are end consumers there is a cloud market. The application of e-commerce website and mobile terminal set up by S company attracts a large number of consumers, which can be effectively realizable.





to meet these 3 prerequisites, the cloud platform must also meet 3 operational elements.





first is the market capacity. On the basis of product planning, we should comprehensively analyze the regional market demand and industrial structure, excavate the business suitable for the development of cloud computing model, and form enough market demand to meet the large-scale development of cloud platform. For example, the province where S company is located, the most suitable business application in this area is the university education Management (which is the most densely populated area in the university, with more than 290 universities), commodity customs clearance (the import and export of a large number of goods, the process of multi-party cooperation), supply chain business The whole process of marketing) and small enterprise production management (including ERP, office, etc.), in the region has sufficient market demand, to meet the requirements of large-scale development of the cloud platform.





second, the application of professional and difficult to obtain. The cloud platform carries the business is a specialized domain function collection, can be figuratively called "the application pool", each individual application must have the sufficient specialization and the scarcity, this kind of scarcity mainly manifests as "deeper" the business insight. In contrast, many unsuccessful applications lack this thinking, and the application of standard applications through the cloud platform provides services that are often unsatisfactory.





third, public credibility. Any cloud platform is a multi-stakeholder platform, only a high degree of credibility to attract a large number of customer groups. This requires the platform at the beginning of construction, carefully identify the key participants in the cloud platform, including advocates, collaborators and participants to determine their role. There are also government regulators. Participants through their respective identities, together to enhance the platform's influence and credibility.





in the cloud business development conditions, the establishment of cloud platform also need to go through 4 stages:





first, strategic analysis or planning phase. In the current environment, what kind of business, what kind of customer, what kind of participants can constitute the cloud model.





Second, the fast start stage. Cloud Platform is to build a model, in the beginning, it is best to invite the region's first several enterprises to participate in building, improve the "influence", enhance the cohesion.





Third, promote the trend of professional development. For example, the ranking model can be used to introduce the most popular applications in various fields, allowing end consumers to push higher application professionalism.





Four, continue to promote credibility. To enhance the credibility of the cloud platform, in addition to the leader, can also introduce industry associations and well-known media and other regulatory agencies to enhance the industry standard, enhance the credibility of the cloud platform.





only meet 3 conditions, 3 elements, through 4 stages, the cloud platform can be successful.





use "cloud" to increase discourse power and competitiveness





s company has 200 billion yuan per year of liquidity, in the receivable, due to the schedule and the customer's prepayment link, resulting in a large amount of precipitation funds. To pursue the liquidity of capital is the core demand of enterprise operation. In the chain, the more participants, the greater the liquidity.





More importantly, after operating on cloud platform, s company as the bearer of this chain, is no longer a retail enterprise, and become an industry operator, vigorously consolidate the position of s company's industry leader, enhance the enterprise in the next 10 years, 20 years or even longer time profitability.





at present, this model is not only the most enthusiastic topic of all telecom operators, but also the most concerned topic of all big enterprises. For those forward-looking businesses, you can use these characteristics of the cloud platform to increase your voice and competitiveness. For companies that do not join the cloud platform, the future may be out of competition in the region or industry.