CICC data: Deconstruction of China's cloud computing industry chain

Today's international competition is not the competition of enterprises, nor the competition of products, but entered an unprecedented era of industrial chain war. If China has in the past on the one hand because of low start, after the reform and opening-up can only start from the processing and manufacturing links to participate in international competition; On the other hand, because of the lack of awareness of the importance of industrial chain competition in the global economic era and the loss of early layout in the traditional industry chain,　　      Oil and labour prices are on the rise in the economic environment suffering; then, when a new industry appears, from the industrial chain perspective of early layout planning is a top priority.





now cloud computing industry is emerging from the traditional IT industry and the internet industry, in a new form in the eyes of the people.       This new model allows users to not invest in expensive computer equipment, do not have to wait for one or two years of project implementation cycle, do not have to bear the risk of project development and on-line, not to worry about maintenance systems, not to worry about the lack of equipment due to changes in business requirements.





more important is that the changes brought about by cloud computing are not limited to the technology field of it, but to the IT, communications, media and entertainment industries, and even traditional industries, bring about subversive changes.　　       Therefore, it is necessary for us to make an in-depth analysis of cloud computing industry chain and future development, to locate the key link in the cloud computing industry chain, to understand the advantages and disadvantages of enterprises at home and abroad, to explore the ways of developing the ecological environment of cloud industry, and to lay the foundation for future Chinese enterprises to make strategic layout in cloud computing industry chain.




Before analyzing the cloud industry chain,
has a clear understanding of "cloud computing" and "industrial chain". Now the industry's definition of cloud computing has many versions, and it's easy to create ambiguity among people, especially non-IT staff. We think that cloud computing is quite different from other calculations in terms of technology, business model and economy.    First from the technical point of view, cloud computing is through the provision of virtualization, fault-tolerant and parallel processing software to the traditional computing, network, storage resources into flexible services.








"cloud computing" and "industrial chain"








For example, Amazon uses Xen virtualization technology to virtualize a physical server farm into a scalable resource pool, and Google uses a fault-tolerant, parallel GFS file system to provide storage services. In terms of business models, cloud computing provides a service delivery pattern that is paid for by usage. For example, Salesforce.com provides an online customer relationship management system that is charged at $125 a month per enterprise user.      Finally, in terms of economics, one of the distinct features of cloud computing is the construction of infrastructure resources that provide large-scale services by using inexpensive servers rather than high-performance servers.





, such as Google and Amazon, use inexpensive servers to provide services. If a calculation does not have these three characteristics at the same time, it is probably not a real cloud computing, but probably grid computing, High-performance computing, or other calculations.　　         In short, cloud computing is a set of technologies and business models that make inexpensive hardware software, software services, service operations, and operations scale.





with "cloud computing" there are many different definitions, "industrial chain" is a widely used but rarely give an accurate definition of nouns, many times and "value chain", "Supply Chain", "Industrial Cluster" mix, to people in the industrial chain analysis brought trouble.　　        So it is necessary for us to make a brief introduction to the ins and outs of the "industrial chain".





The theory of industrial chain originated from the Western classical economist Adam Smith's description of the production division of labor. He used the needle in the 18 process examples of the industry chain function of a vivid description, but he described the industrial chain is limited to the internal operation of enterprises, emphasizing the use of their own resources, only the industrial chain as a production chain (process) and the carrying logistics of the product chain.       Then Marshall (A Marshall) to expand the division of labor between enterprises and enterprises, emphasizing the importance of cooperation between enterprises, the concept of the enterprise chain into the industrial chain.





Stevens (Stevens) in 1989 extended the industry chain to a system of suppliers, distributors, and consumers, which ran through the feedback of logistics and information flow. So the connotation of industrial chain is not only a product chain, but also an information chain and function chain. Porter (Michael Porter), in 1985, presented the theory of value chain analysis, he observed that enterprises from the creation to the production of operations through the series of links and activities, both inputs, but also show the increase in value, so that these activities into a cost chain and value chain,        Reflects the process by which the industrial chain transforms raw materials into a series of final products and continuously realizes value added.





Harrison (Harrison) in 1993 based on the concept of value network, the industrial chain from a linear chain to the network, the industrial chain defined as from raw materials procurement, to intermediate products and finished product transformation, the final product sales to the user's functional networks.





Industrial chain is a comprehensive concept, from the angle of supply chain, value chain, strategic alliance, industrial economic relevance, core competitiveness and production process, we can analyze the product association, Value Association, Enterprise Association, Information Association, function correlation, Department Association and Spatio-temporal correlation in the industrial chain.　　       Here we give a simple definition of industrial chain: industrial chain is within a certain geographical range, has the competition and cooperative relations of enterprises in accordance with the production process of products and services and value distribution of the industrial organization.




The
industry chain has many forms of expression, the form of the industrial chain with product as the link content, which forms the material flow in the industrial chain, is often called the product chain, and the industrial chain form, which is linked with the price or the capital, forms the industrial cost chain and the value chain; the industrial chain form of the product and service value-added process Forming an activity chain or business process; a form of industrial chain based on the relationship between supply and demand of products and services, constitute the supply chain, the enterprise's Strategic Cooperation and Alliance for the content of the industrial chain form, constitute the ecological chain, and in the production and consumption of products and services in the process of knowledge transmission, information feedback as the contact content of the industrial form,　　       constitutes an industry information chain.





cloud computing industry from the traditional IT industry, communications industry, radio and television media and the Internet industry in the integration of the emergence of the determinants of not only technical innovation, product service innovation, more importantly, business model innovation. This determines that its connotation and extension of the industrial chain is richer, more extensive and more complex than the traditional industrial chain, and its form is also more net, with complex network characteristics.　　 In addition to the traditional value chain analysis, core competitiveness analysis and process optimization methods, we also need to integrate innovative theory and complex network analysis methods.


     


traditional IT industry and internet industry chain





in order to better understand the cloud computing industry chain, we first of the traditional IT industry and the internet industry chain for a brief analysis. Traditional IT industry chain is relatively simple and intuitive. The traditional IT industry chain mainly serves the enterprise, and the enterprise ultimately serves their customers. The main industry chain consists of six links, including chip, hardware, basic software, application software, enterprise and user. Chip, hardware by specialized manufacturers, including product design, raw material procurement, logistics and transportation, order Processing, wholesale operations, terminal retail and processing and manufacturing and other subdivision.      Basic software includes operating system, database and middleware, mainly by specialized software companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.





from chip to hardware, basic software, and then application software, it is increasing in value, enterprises can use it to improve product productivity and better meet customer requirements.       The whole industry chain mainly carries the logistics, one is from the chip to the computer hardware, the basic software to the application software logistics, one is the enterprise product to the end user's logistics.





Enterprises in the early days of the information is more than the purchase of hardware equipment, the purchase of basic software, their own installation, their own development of application software, their own integrated system. With the development of IT technology, computer technology more and more complex, many enterprises have no ability to do application software development and integration, then many Third-party application software development and system integrators came into being. In the 90 's, the Western rising IT outsourcing service upsurge, enterprises in order to focus on the core competitiveness of the improvement, the Non-core Business Room management, system maintenance, application development and system integration outsourced to a third party, forming an IT outsourcing industry chain.        In addition to the value stream in the outsourcing industry chain, an obvious characteristic is that the information flow becomes the link of the industrial chain.





By the late 90, the internet had emerged, with two major business models. The first category is that Internet operators offer free or low-cost services to consumers, and attract businesses to advertise on their websites by clicking on the Internet, which is called the "eye economy" model. In this mode, the value of it is mainly through the chip, hardware, basic software, platform software transmission to the Internet operators, and finally to consumers, and many consumers of Internet operators on the Web site, reflecting the potential advertising value, to attract enterprises to advertise on the site,       Consumers end up closing the value chain by buying an enterprise product that is learned from advertising.





such as Google, Yahoo, the domestic Sina, Baidu, Tencent, etc. are the practice of this model of successful enterprises. The second type is E-commerce mode, enterprises through the Internet operators to open up online sales channels, significantly reduce the traditional business venues, warehousing, as well as marketing, sales manpower costs. From the beginning of the internet to now a short span of more than 10 years, has emerged a large number of such as Amazon, Ctrip, EBay, Taobao, when, Jingdong Mall and other pure E-commerce leader, the birth of a large-scale logistics distribution industry, traditional retailers have increasingly felt the competitive pressure from E-commerce.      In the Internet industry chain, the internet operator is the key link, it integrates the data center, the telecommunication network and the content provider resources, becomes the communication consumer, the enterprise, the electronic commerce provider's Bridge.





the traditional IT industry chain, under the impetus of economic globalization and outsourcing tide, gradually adopt the Internet as the platform of large-scale and cross-regional service delivery. On the other hand, with the rapid development and expansion of e-commerce and internet industry, internet operators have more intensive and large demand for computing resources and storage resources. Especially in the Internet era, business needs over time, the market changes very much, enterprises, especially the Internet operators need less cost, on-demand computing resources.





Traditional It computing patterns are becoming less adaptable to demand. Take Amazon for example, it began to be engaged in online bookstore e-commerce operators, need to prepare a large number of computing resources for peak business, and usually these computational resources are idle, utilization is very low, resulting in a lot of waste; and to the peak of business such as Christmas,        Traditional IT architectures cannot be rapidly scaled to meet the needs of the business for additional computing resources.





in this case, Amazon boldly uses the virtualization technology to transform the physical computing resources into a flexible resource pool, on the one hand, to meet the needs of E-commerce for computing, storage resources, on the other hand, also open the pool of resources,        Through the Internet to other enterprises and individual users by the use of paid computing resources and storage resources services, opened the cloud computing services practice.





the same period, the consumer Internet industry representative of the enterprise Google in order to meet the online search for computing resources expanding demand, but also discard the traditional it model, in the hardware, basic software, platform software, data center of the various aspects of bold innovation, such as on the hardware for the search workload customized Low-cost server;        The introduction of operating system, distributed relational database and large-scale parallel fault-tolerant map-reduce technology in the foundation software, the platform that can provide multi-tenant management in the platform software is the service app, and the modular, high-density, low-carbon and energy-saving container data center are adopted in the data center.





Google is the first in the cloud computing industry chain vertical integration and success of the enterprise, its industrial chain continues to expand, and gradually to entertainment, mobile phones, and even to the energy industry. Another example of a particularly successful integration of the cloud industry chain is Apple.        Apple turned out to be a traditional it enterprise that did not develop successfully in the 90 's.





       since Mr. Jobs took over Apple, Apple has made a successful transition to the entertainment consumer products and mobile phone industry chain, while using the public-application cloud Platform App Store and itunes to make music entertainment, Software applications are posted to beautiful, Easy-to-use cloud devices via the internet and mobile Internet, and icloud automatically synchronizes content on different Apple cloud devices. The success of Apple's transformation in the cloud computing industry in 2011 overtook its former IT giants, IBM and Microsoft, in both market capitalisation and profits.