Cloud computing dilemma

A media friend called to consult me about one thing. said that in Jiangsu and Zhejiang area, there is an international freight forwarders private entrepreneurs, want to use cloud computing to integrate a variety of resources, such as transport fleets, warehouses, containers and even cargo ships. The provisioning of these resources is important for any business that engages in foreign trade, and if the information is placed on the so-called "cloud" and is calculated, these enterprises are then linked to the "cloud" with various devices, which the entrepreneur feels is a promising business. The media friend's call is to ask me to talk about my opinion.

Because I am not too familiar, I say is quite polite, I use "may in the long run is a direction, short time need enough patience to nurture" argument. But my real opinion is: In China, this kind of cloud computing, the present is really very slim.

Cloud computing in general, there are three major categories of functions, one for the "save Money", the second to provide the basis for the internet of things, its three "synergy."

Save money by putting a large number of computations requiring high-performance processors on the cloud, thereby reducing the "end" input. The model looks good, but don't forget that the cloud and the end need to be connected.

The high cost of Internet access in China may be beyond the imagination of many people. There is a rumor that China's broadband access cost is 7,000 times times that of South Korea, this is a bit exaggerated, we still cite an official saying: "If the income gap is taken into account, 2008 per capita national income is 6.9 times times of our country, which means that China's broadband tariff level equivalent to 124 times times South Korea." A report from the Information Research Department of the National Information Center. The current Chinese mainland residents to access the Internet price is about 100 yuan/month, enjoy the average bandwidth of less than 1M, and Hong Kong's price is 199 HKD/month, enjoy the bandwidth is 1 G. And, more importantly, I mentioned above are specifically "resident Internet access", in practice, such as Shanghai, the price of enterprise access is 10 times times the resident access.

Of course, China already has a lot of enterprises to access the Internet, for them, this is already "sunk cost", why not use the cloud? But China's bandwidth is not only high cost, but also very slow. CNNIC's report earlier this year pointed out that although the broadband penetration rate of China's wired (fixed net) users is already as high as 98.3%, the national average Internet connection speed is only 100.9kb/s, far below the global average connection speed (230.4kb/s).

It is impractical to change this narrow and expensive situation in the short term. Basically, China's civil Internet access (that is, enterprises and residents) is a monopoly by state-owned enterprises market: The general is nothing more than telecommunications and radio and television, and telecommunications and netcom in most areas hold a dominant position. Cloud computing These three words is not a year or two, but so far little to see what specific commercial results, the reason for the head is very complex, but the network support is weak, should be an important part.

A used to hope to help themselves to save money and also can improve the efficiency of the application, the result is expensive and slow, presumably many not like the state-owned enterprises are not bad money of private companies, is to take a good look. The beautiful picture depicted by cloud computing: The enterprise's IT investment does not need to allocate the investment according to the highest demand like today, but instead is replaced with the demand to use with the settlement, but implements in the reality, then appears so awkward and bitter.

Therefore, the Amazon Cloud computing in the United States is unthinkable in China. Amazon has almost replaced the traditional IDC, so that even Twitter, a popular application, starts with its services. And in China? The important thing is not IDC, but the telecommunications behind it, where it will easily give up the lucrative profits. Anyone who has ever worked on the data communications business should have experienced the strength of Chinese operators.

As for providing the foundation for the Internet of Things, the first example of the article is actually related to it. For example, transport vehicles are on the way, exactly in which section, load geometry, can be connected through the Internet of things and automatic operation. But the internet of things is also called for many years, but the application is not a broad concept, the Internet is limited by IP address, but also limited by the data transmission standards, more limited by this: our labor is relatively cheap, high-tech input does not let the human input to reduce how much.

The Internet of things does not exist, and what is the need for cloud computing to provide assistance?

So, quite a lot of so-called "cloud computing", in fact, is a collaborative operation. This is a big area of China's land, it has a strong practical significance: at least save a lot of travel costs. SAAS (software as a service) type of cloud computing, there is a certain market. If you are not too concerned about business secrets, many SMEs in fact, there is no special secret can be considered a plan to accept.

Amazon in the United States to do cloud computing, almost a miracle. It took less than two years, from scratch, already has hundreds of thousands of registered development users and a large number of enterprise users, the revenue related to cloud computing is billion-dollar equivalent. But this miracle is built on the network environment is highly developed on the basis of: cloud and end of the connection between the cheap to unimaginable, it can naturally take advantage of this cheap fuss, for tens of thousands of enterprises to reduce costs.

However, in China, even VoIP business, can not be a name, see how telecom a pulse of their inherent income is how much care, and how strong. In this context, cloud computing is more about a "conceptualization", a low level application that is not even a complete SaaS, a kind of web-type email that is called cloud computing.

This road, for the people, still very long.

(Responsible editor: Liu Fen)