Cloud computing: The most beautiful business model meets the uncertain business

Cloud computing, originating from the Internet, is now being overtaken by the Internet. By the media and industry after a few years, we found that the first proposed cloud computing, the promotion of cloud computing manufacturers do not seem to have any successful projects, but the concept of cloud is applied to the Internet and even outside the field, such as cloud, Cloud TV, cloud antivirus ...

The most valuable thing about cloud computing is that it is an on-demand business model that will affect areas outside the IT industry; the business model advocated and the core technology involved, most of which are faltering, are a long way from the real cloud computing model.

Here are three perspectives to share ideas:

The first perspective: business model

Main point: Cloud computing is most valuable is its business model: on-demand access, on-demand, is the most beautiful business model, but also the greatest shock to the industry, will be extended to the industry outside it, or even the impact of business thinking.

It domain cloud service promotion, the biggest resistance is the trust, the trust solves the core not the technology, but is to the User Service quality commitment.

Evaluate the implementation of cloud computing projects, whether successful or not, from a commercial perspective.

The business perspective of cloud computing: The growth, use, and delivery of internet-based services.

Its core concept is: on-demand access, on-demand pay, centralized management. Users from the traditional purchase of hardware and software, chimney-style system deployment, self maintenance, to purchase services from the network, without operating services, thus focusing on business.

According to this idea, can have a lot of imagination space, let IT system really fully use up, is the IT field of communist society. For small and medium-sized enterprises, the asset expenditure can be turned into operational support, increased cash flow, but also to get rid of it from the unfamiliar and input, or even low-cost way to enjoy the original need for high-value business services; For large enterprises, a new operating income model, the sale of equipment for rental equipment;

The idea of cloud computing from it to other areas, logistics, transportation, business operations and other fields, it is not the same as the IT system status quo, are chimney-type construction, if they can be unified management of these systems or resources, platform operation, on demand, can indeed improve efficiency, The contribution is much greater than the cloud implementation of IT systems. So, personally think that the idea of cloud computing further sublimation, is the most valuable thing in cloud computing, and is the most likely to be the cloud computing professionals are fooled by the part.

Suningyun, the industry's first in the cloud to transform the enterprise operating structure of the precedent, regardless of success or failure, at least represents a direction. is to further deepen the cloud service model, and gradually explore the line under the line of multi-channel integration, the whole category of business, open Platform services business form, Suning believes that the future of China's retail model will be "shop + Dealer + retail service provider", called "cloud business" model. Its essence is to unify the background resources, do not need to maintain two or even more than one set of operating systems, the physical store and the Internet as a user's portal, resources on-demand deployment.

And then Ma's rookie Logistics backbone network, its purpose is to the logistics resources platform operation, unified management scheduling, to achieve the sharing of resources. Through the establishment, the construction, the cooperation, the transformation and so on many kinds of models, forms a set of open socialized warehousing facility network. At the same time, the use of advanced Internet technology, to establish an open, transparent, shared data application platform for E-commerce Enterprises, logistics companies, warehousing enterprises, Third-party logistics providers, supply chain service providers and other enterprises to provide on-demand access to services.

Therefore, cloud computing is a beautiful business model, restructuring is not only the IT industry, the real change is the enterprise and the operation of the community concept.

The biggest challenge of cloud service model implementation is trust, behind which is the security, reliability and privacy of data. Trust is not solved by technology, but by management and commitment. Just like Alipay, it solves the trust problem of the user net purchase and relies on the mechanism. The cloud service model is the same.

Cloud service is the decisive factor is the network, only the network at any time, access fluency, cloud services to promote the foundation. Network broadband is also the basic factor of the promotion of the concept model such as Internet of Things and intelligent city.

Since cloud computing is beautiful in its business model, the success or failure of the project should be evaluated from the business model perspective, and product technology is the means to achieve the business model.

In 2008, for example, IBM announced the creation of China's first cloud computing in the Taihu Lake, which delivered IBM a host of traditional, expensive hardware and software, and operating revenues were not enough to cover security costs. IBM later thought it was technically successful, and that was not good.

For example, some companies want to use cloud computing technology to improve IT systems utilization and management efficiency, and the reality is that equipment utilization is upgraded, can be replaced by new equipment, but also to buy expensive software, investment has increased a lot, do not save money.

Second perspective: Business model

Main point: IaaS is the most basic and simple, users have realistic needs, technology breakthrough challenges.

PAAs is the most competitive and only a handful of giants can afford to play.

SaaS looks beautiful and the real outlook is bleak.

A new model, a new concept, the description of the better, the final need to cloud for rain, it is important to be able to provide users what services, such services can effectively solve the real problem.

The business model of cloud computing can be viewed from three levels: Iaas,paas,saas.

The business level is different, the user localization is different, the challenge is also different, the reality and ideal distance is more different.

IaaS, Infrastructure-level services: Consumers can get services from a sophisticated computer infrastructure through the Internet. These services include virtual computing, virtual storage, virtual networks, virtual databases, hosting, and so on.

The ideal requirement of cloud computing is: to provide users with flexible computing, flexible storage and network based software services on demand, in a transparent self-service manner.

Provides low-cost computing, storage capabilities, and guarantees high availability and security of services.

The reality is: most of the service providers derived from IDC, services provided by the way close to the manual, limited flexibility calculation, at any time on demand almost no, more is the traditional virtual host renamed Cloud Host to become cloud computing service provider, the user experience has not changed.

However, users of this kind of demand in the growth, especially online storage, virtual host, therefore, as long as the service providers continue to improve services, or there will be a larger growth. Of course, the improvement of user experience depends on technology, mainly virtualization technology.

PaaS, platform as a service: middleware in a cloud environment is a service. The ability to integrate existing business capabilities, down to the business capacity needs to measure the basic service capabilities, through the API provided by the APIs to invoke hardware resources, up to provide business scheduling center services, real-time monitoring of the various resources of the platform, and the resources through the API open to SaaS users.

The ability to integrate to form a platform, is necessarily to have a booming or scale of business, the first PAAs in the business after the need to focus on:

Process choreography, blending and reuse for different business services

Support and motivate third parties to develop new services and quickly deploy, test and operate online

In China, there are only a few internet giants, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, or niche industry leaders who can provide PAAs services, such as gaming platforms. Although the three telecommunications operators have the appeal, but lack of business, lack of research and development team and the rapid response to user needs, but also powerless. Small and medium-sized enterprises, but also do not think about it.

SaaS, Software as a service: Software delivered over the Internet, charging users a monthly service charge. Technically good, it allows for instant registration, greatly reduces the cost of consolidation, and allows users to try out before purchasing, and has good scalability. Service and experience are at the heart of this field:

Application software services that provide a high user experience through the Internet and browsers

Achieve a high level of service reuse, support large, highly flexible, complex personalized requirements of the user base

In reality, the SaaS services are dazzling, most commonly used are: ERP,CRM, bookkeeping, electricity, marketing, contacts, collaboration, and so on, such as the breakdown of services, fragmented business services, users can not be consistent throughout the entire service and experience, resulting in a useful and can not be used in scale.

By sharing the model to reduce costs, the domestic customer awareness and behavior habits is a challenge, in the credit system is not perfect, the general existence of "integrity crisis" of the situation, China's SMEs are very uneasy to their own financial data, customer data such core confidential information on the Internet.

Therefore, the SaaS business model can be said to be seemingly beautiful, actual bleak, in line with the realities of the business more long.

The third perspective: technology system

Main point: The core technology is difficult to break through in the short term, all of them take virtualization as cloud computing.

The engine room becomes the investment key, takes the cloud computing, also as pulls the investment the gimmick.

Technology is the service of the business, the technical requirements of cloud computing, should be based on the business dimension to derive the requirements of the technology. Cloud computing systems involve a variety of technologies, including: virtualization, large-scale distributed database management technology, distributed parallel programming mode, service-oriented application assembly and management, online service development testing and programming technology, front-end display and delivery technology. The discussion of technology should be subject to business value, and if the business model is wrong, there is no point in discussing advanced technology.

SaaS part: the need to focus on the needs of users, technology is no longer important.

PAAs: The core should be the normalization of business capabilities, standardization of interfaces, the existing business capabilities to be integrated open. After all, this is something that only a few giants can do, so it is touted as a core technology for distributed computing. In addition to research, the actual business support is quite limited.

IaaS section: The core is the scheduling and use of hardware virtualization resources, including server virtualization, desktop virtualization, storage virtualization, and network virtualization. Virtualization technology comes from enterprise applications, and more is resource sharing and backup of one or several servers. Cloud computing needs more than just sharing, but can combine different hardware resources to provide services, large-scale, distributed deployment, seamless migration. Technologies that involve servers, storage, networking, virtualization, cloud management, and cloud security are challenging.

In the case of the core technology can not be breakthrough, most enterprises tend to improve the user experience, such as online storage, so that users can easily backup storage, but also to be recognized by customers.

In the field of virtual host, most enterprises are unwilling and unable to conquer the core technology, only virtualization as cloud computing, small-scale resource sharing, simple virtual machine allocation as a cloud resource scheduling. Even IBM, the so-called industry leader, implements many of the projects that are server + virtualization software.

When the core technology is not progressing, as the infrastructure of IaaS-the room, also be as an important part of cloud computing, to green energy-saving, pull investment for gimmick hype.