Cloud computing is starting to make money.

500 million dollars, this year's revenue from the Amazon Cloud computing division, which is forecast by the UBS investment research firm, will have revenues of around $2.5 billion by 2014.

Although these figures are somewhat insignificant compared to Amazon's 24.5 billion dollar sales last year, it is an important sign: cloud computing, a word that has been hotly fired by the industry, is no longer just a concept, it has begun to bring real money to businesses.

The big crocodiles are smashing the money.

For more than two years, cloud computing has become one of the most talked-about technologies and business trends since some it giants such as Google, IBM and Microsoft have joined the layout of the cloud. But not everyone is bullish on its future.

Oracle Chairman Ellison, Oracle Open World, at the end of 2008, once said cloud computing, "you can't even find a company that doesn't claim to be doing cloud computing, and the computer industry is the only industry that pursues concepts and trends more than women's fashion world." ”

Even at a summit of the IT leaders held in March this year, the chief executive of the three largest Internet companies in China, Baidu Chairman and C E O Li still think cloud computing is "new bottles of old wine, no new things," Tencent board chairman and CEO Ma is that cloud computing is a more advanced concept, but its idea is still too early. Only Jack Ma, chairman of Alibaba's board of directors, felt "most afraid of the old wine in the new bottle.

E M C Company Global senior vice president and China Research and Development Group chairman Fan told the "talent" reporter, Cloud computing business model is not very clear, "so whether or not cloud computing is happening, the probability of how much no one knows, but we think it happens more than 50% probability." ”

However, EMC's latest release of the 2010 second-quarter earnings statement has already explained some of the issues. In this record quarter, EMC's combined revenue reached $4.02 billion trillion, up 24% year-on-year, and net income grew 108% per cent year-on-year. Among them, the fast-growing EMC backup and recovery system B R S Department contributed more than 1 billion dollars in sales.

Microsoft is a bit late, but it is now a huge investment in cloud computing. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced in March this year that the company will put future developments on cloud computing services because "3.3 trillion of billions of dollars of global industry are betting on incredible cloud technology changes". In 2010, Microsoft spent more than $9.5 billion on research and development, most of it on cloud computing. Now, 70% of Microsoft's 40,000 engineers are working on cloud-related products and services, which will even rise to 90% next year.

Hewlett-Packard has been slow in cloud computing, and in September this year it had a fierce battle with Dell, culminating in a 2.4 billion dollar bid for 3PAR, which had successfully focused on data storage, while Dell's initial bid was 1.15 billion dollars. With 3PAR revenue in the bag, HP has high-end data-storage products that will help it build a basic platform for cloud computing faster to rival IBM's old rivals.

Whether you see the trend earlier, or want to striking, cloud computing has been fully preheated, now not only to see which it company's cloud computing technology is more advanced, but also to see who can first find a profitable business model, to win more customers.

The Giants have every advantage.

Zhang, chairman of Microsoft Asia-Pacific Research and Development Group, told the "talent" reporter, "the Big cloud platform only a few big companies can do, Microsoft will be one of them." IBM China Development Center CTO Mao said, "Cloud battle is the Battle of these guys, IBM is clearly one of them, and is a leader." ”

Although companies such as Microsoft and IBM think they will occupy an important position in the future of the cloud, there is still a long way to go to truly implement the layout of the cloud industry.

Cloud computing = (data software + platform + infrastructure) x service, Zhang uses the formula method to express what is cloud computing. It can be seen that there is no service without applications, cloud computing will only stay in the concept of theory.

Infrastructure, infrastructure, network services, platforms, applications, security, and management--this is the 7 areas that the IT consulting firm BTC Logic has divided the cloud computing market into. They argue that Amazon and IBM are in a relatively advanced position as they rank among the top 5 in 4 areas. Microsoft and Google have not ranked first in any field.

It companies have a similar vision for cloud computing, but there are ways to implement them. Fan bare the mystery, "IBM, Google, Microsoft's cloud computing model is essentially a continuation of existing business models." ”

Amazon, Google, a class of internet companies, its advantage in the cloud is the application of IBM, Microsoft is good at platform building, EMC this type of storage and other hardware companies, the strength of the cloud infrastructure.

IBM's core business is servers, software, and global services. IBM's "Blue Cloud" has been the technology foundation of the Cloud Computing Center and the new enterprise-class data center since its launch. February 2008, IBM established the first cloud computing center in the Wuxi Taihu New Town Science and Technology industrial Park, which is the first commercial cloud computing Center in the Asia-Pacific region. Microsoft is the world's largest software provider, and in the era of cloud computing, Microsoft will provide users with a p a S (platform as a service), SaaS (software as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). In October 2008, Microsoft launched the Windowsazure operating system, hoping to build a "blue sky" platform on the Internet architecture.

This year, Microsoft launched a program called "Urban Expansion" in China. In September, the first phase of the four cities, including Dongguan, Qingdao, Xian and Nanjing, was completed.

Microsoft, IBM and others are actively working with local governments and High-tech parks to set up cloud computing centers, and to win over some small business customers. When Microsoft and IBM implemented Cloud computing solutions, they essentially migrated and extended existing hardware and software technologies to cloud computing, so they had a lot in common when they landed in China.

Enterprise focus on data security

It is generally believed that the so-called "cloud" is divided into public clouds, private clouds and mixed clouds. Fan said that from domestic and foreign markets, the development of cloud storage from both ends to the middle of the trend, the first use of public clouds are often individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises, and the first to use private cloud is large enterprise users.

From the outset, EMC has focused on mining enterprise customers, first helping them virtualize, and then leveraging their own storage technologies to help them build private clouds.

The BTC Logic survey found that companies do not deploy cloud computing technology in large numbers until problems related to security, privacy, and data storage locations are fully resolved, as companies want to have greater control over data.

Data collection, integration, statistics, analysis, control, these applications may be placed in the cloud, or may not be, can be controlled, there may be no way to control, but they have to safely, easily into business processes. "Cloud computing is just a technical basis for achieving these goals," Mao said.

However, Informatica, senior technical advisor Dussassen of China, recently discovered in contact with customers that they are increasingly focusing on unifying the core and key data of the enterprise, and that other systems are doing business operations and sales around the data. In the original IT system, the data are generally dispersed, forming an island of data.

John Gillam, director of global Services cloud services at BT, told the "talent" reporter, in the cloud era, its own advantage is that they can be a good part of each of these technologies to optimize the integration, so as to bring customers with large-scale, flexible, high value-added management services.

Anyway, the revolutionary technology of cloud computing the impact is not only a point, more of the face, not only the impact of technology, but also the business model of the company, EMC China Excellence Research and Development Group general manager Li Ying told the "Excellence" reporter, "cloud computing brings the most revolutionary changes in the IT management of the business model changes."