Obsessed with concept hype, cloud computing profit model puzzle

"When a patient goes to the hospital, the value is not how high the building is, but how high your medical skill is and how thoughtful your service is." "The current situation of" infrastructure and enterprise Applications "is described in this way by Chris, the chairman and president of the North Sen company, the co-founder of the company.

In Chris's view, in the domestic cloud computing field, do more hardware than do software, do the basis than do more applications.

Chris is trying to change that dilemma. As a talent management software provider, North Sen is building a cloud computing platform. "This platform has a lot of modules, to ' people ' as the business object, can help enterprises to solve the ' election, use, education, stay ' people all aspects of the problem. More importantly, the enterprise does not need to buy this platform, just leasing to use--I need how much use, how much I spend how much money. ”

The growth of North Sen is just a kind of change of China's cloud industry. "China Cloud computing Application Model Engineering Strategy Research" report, Sadie Consultant, the current application of cloud computing in China presents three development trends: the driving force from "policy guidance" to "market-driven", the source of business innovation from "technology-oriented" to "application-oriented", competition focus from "single application" to "platform construction".

Application of cloud industry to the ground

The report shows that the next 3 years of cloud computing applications will be the government, telecommunications, education, medical, financial, petrochemical and power industries as the focus, market size will also from 2010 to 16.731 billion yuan to 2013 of 117.412 billion yuan, the annual composite growth rate reached 91.5%.

In the view of an IT company executive, cloud computing industry can be divided into three categories: the establishment of a cloud computing center, the purchase of real estate, servers and other hardware; the other is the use of cloud computing functions for the Enterprise services, and a class is to apply cloud computing technology to people's lives, and the integration of Internet technology, to serve consumers.

In the Cloud application field has persisted for nearly 5 years the Digital star CEO Jianhua told "China Enterprise newspaper" reporter, the business innovation source originally should be the application direction, now everybody puts the attention to the application, is the rational return.

"The development of cloud computing mainly relies on the development of technology and the evolution of application two forces." Cloud computing will permeate more comprehensive areas, and daily life will increasingly be associated with cloud computing. "Jianhua said.

"Cloud computing + Mobile Terminal" model is the first choice to speed up the development of enterprise Management informatization, the new white Paper on cloud computing published in the digital sky.

As a new kind of information technology, cloud computing can meet users ' requirement of information reading faster, and make it have great development potential. "CIC Consultant IT industry researcher Li Fangting said in an interview with the China Enterprise newspaper that it is because of the difference of individual needs of different users that the development trend tends to turn to buyer's market, and to build applications and platforms according to user's market demand."

This judgment also received Chris approval. "Cloud computing platform covers the whole process of talent selection, use, education, and retention, and its multiple leasing architecture not only injects the concept of talent management into the background of standardization, but also creates personalized foreground for enterprises." Under the fixed core, the enterprise can realize the individuation demand of the enterprise through the simple configuration, the HR has terminated the time of choosing by the choice. ”

Autodesk, senior director of core products and operations at China Research Institute Shengsong also said that cloud services is more of its scalability, you can use this platform to do more than the original things.

"I am personally cautious about the ' platform heat ' of the cloud computing industry. Jianhua said that from a global perspective, there is no pure cloud computing platform, that is to say, now a successful platform, but also based on killer application developed.

What does cloud computing do? It is the key problem that puzzles the public to understand cloud computing, enterprise Practice cloud computing, many enterprises are doing cloud computing research, but the idea is starting from concept, few application support, this falls into a concept hype circle. In Jianhua's view, the nature of cloud computing is application, and without applications, no architecture is meaningful;

"In fact, the general trend of cloud computing is user-oriented, so the overall trend can be fixed, but because of the diversity of user needs also make its development process ambiguous." "Li Fangting said.

The profit problem of business model

Industry insiders generally believe that the cloud computing industry is still trapped in the data security, funds and other constraints, and the profit model is currently a more difficult problem. "The cloud computing industry has only one way to land, that is, research and development, application and popularization." "Jianhua said.

Zhou, general economist of the Ministry of Industry and Technology, thinks that cloud computing is still in the stage of technical reserve and concept promotion in our country, and its development still faces great challenges, such as the choice of standards and technology, data security, capital, construction and operation mode and many other problems.

October 2011, the National Development and Reform Commission for five pilot cities Cloud computing Application demonstration project of the first batch of financial support received approval, support funds reached 1.5 billion yuan, and by the end of November 2011, by the NDRC allocated 660 million yuan "support cloud computing first batch of special funds" has been in place, including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Kingdee software, including more than 10 enterprises have been tens of millions of dollars and even hundreds of billions of support funds.

Previously, deep venture investment and Tianjin Venture investment for the North Sen capital injection tens of millions of dollars. Chris revealed that the money will be mainly used for cloud computing product module research and development, North Sen is also seeking further capital operation, to land the gem, the current relevant work in the preparation process.

Zhou Cunyu, senior investment adviser at Galaxy Securities, said cloud computing is still difficult to reach the stage of the Internet's proposed profit model. The initial need for some technology or equipment, model of the company's investment, and then will need to see the entire industry derived opportunities. "Of course, some companies are doing a better job of cloud computing and can significantly improve their profitability or the replication capabilities of the entire model." ”

"The market's pull on cloud computing has increased compared to previous years, but policy guidance is still important for the development of the cloud industry," he said. "The key issue, Jianhua, is that the benign development of the cloud computing industry requires proper government guidance, such as expanding the size of government-sourced cloud services quickly,

"Instead of giving money to publicly traded companies that don't know what to spend, they should shift their limited cloud-nurturing funds to prop up the professional small and medium cloud firms that really need the money." ”

Li Fangting said that the profit model is not clear and the specific application of the rich is not enough is the current application of cloud computing enterprises are facing a more difficult problem, the former will directly lead to input-output ratio can not achieve the expected, and even cause the duplication of resources and waste of resources, but also will affect the long-term development The latter will greatly reduce the user experience satisfaction, so that the extension is blocked, it is difficult to obtain scale benefits.

(Responsible editor: Liu Fen)