Cloud computing will dominate server market channels or big shuffle

Resource contention for partners with resource integration capabilities, the ability to implement cloud computing, will be the main competitive point in the future server industry chain.

Although 2011 years have not ended, according to the supplier in the past two quarters of sales performance and the short-term market conditions of the forecast situation, the entire server industry, the whole year two largest market growth point, respectively, from the Internet and the government's cloud computing procurement projects.

"In third-party reports, the domestic server market in 2011 showed a growth rate of nearly 30% per cent in the past, with no annual growth of more than this year." Chang, Intel server platform Product manager, said, "This growth was in the first year of the Twelve-Five plan, when large government procurement did not occur." You can imagine the extent to which the overall market has been driven by exploding procurement needs, such as social networks, IPDC and cloud computing. "

China's demand for server procurement is just a projection of global market changes. The global market for servers in the first half of 2011 was 17% per cent year-on-year, and the industry was surprised by the high share of Internet and cloud-driven growth in the overall market, according to the Global Markets report, which was released shortly ago by IDC.

In the server market, the growth of X86 server and the penetration of the key business also showed a more obvious trend in the 2011. With the purchase demand of users becoming more and more rational, the characteristics of green energy-saving, reliability and manageability of the system are more and more concerned. As new versions of X86 server processors adopt more new technologies, more and more industry customers are starting to migrate their key businesses to X86.

In China, more than four-way servers in the market share of nearly 11%, in the world is less than 5%. And this market share will continue to rise, the future may reach 15% of the share. The growth of X86 servers in key business applications is evident.

Internet demand drives price war

In a new explosion in the Internet industry, with new popular applications such as SNS, microblogging, group buying, online gaming and mobile applications, the demand for server procurement and deployment growth has been placed in a very high position. Compared with previous years, the current Internet service Provider search provides a wider range of applications, resulting in a greater demand for services and application outbreaks. Take the domestic market as an example, in addition to focus on search and bidding rankings related to the business of Baidu, the other large internet companies are almost horizontal expansion of their business, resulting in the purchase amount of any one server industry can not ignore.

"In the Internet industry as a whole, the fastest growing server demand is the emerging Internet application-driven, IT infrastructure for backing up in the background." "In the cloud computing world, where the user's heuristics and skepticism have largely been eliminated in the past few years, the question of ' What is cloud computing ' or ' what's the benefit of cloud computing ' is already being discussed, with more users, including local cloud computing centers, operators and businesses," said Chang. has focused on how cloud computing has fallen to the ground. Their understanding of cloud computing and application of the degree of further deepening of the server market has also played a relatively large impetus. "

Compared with the traditional industry for the server procurement requirements, the Internet industry, whether in product demand or in procurement mode are completely different. These purchases are far more than the same size of traditional enterprises of the new users have a strong program design capabilities, they often want to design their own product architecture, while the traditional server provider only to play the role of providing hardware, customization requirements than any previous industry. In other words, companies with more customization capabilities will have a higher share of the internet industry.

In addition, large Internet companies have a stronger need for the service capabilities of IT infrastructure providers. Better service and more timely manufacturers and solutions to the market in this fierce competition in a foothold. In addition, some Internet industry customers have a huge demand for software, especially development and management software, and they want IT infrastructure providers to help with their own software systems, provide them with support for IT management, application development process management, but in the procurement process, Their hardware procurement and software procurement is separate, in the simple server procurement, whether the more powerful software capabilities, has not yet become the Internet giants procurement server hardware is the main criterion.

"Compared with other industry users, internet users, regardless of size, are the most lack of loyalty group, product price is reasonable, product design and service to meet his needs, these users are the only reference conditions, and the first in the project bidding is particularly important." "There are comments from insiders.

It is true that in the Internet industry, whether it is in the country and even the world to form a fact monopoly of large companies, or just started, the purchase volume of hundreds of to thousands of small enterprises, the price competition is very obvious. In this kind of impulse to help the most direct industry, more and more manufacturers to take a direct price war to attract customers, even at the cost of the line to provide customers with a complete set of server systems. This kind of competition method not only messes up the market situation, but also makes the channel that does not have the advantage of price competition resources more and more difficult to participate in the construction process of the Internet industry project. This is not really good for internet companies that need timely localization services.

The Internet industry in the project purchase bargain is the common phenomenon in the whole industry. May be encountered in every Internet project. The internet on the cost of a large degree, low profit can be understood, but the server is a comprehensive market, in the Internet industry, there are some traditional, not sensitive to the price of the industry, different segments of the market or make profits, is able to achieve balance. In addition, the Internet industry may be out of value, if it can better meet their business requirements, can bring value.

The trend of customization leads the internet market

In the Internet industry, while the demand for server procurement increased, its customization requirements for server products are also growing. First-line Internet industry users of the server product planning has been done two years later, how to build the computer room in 2013, how to deploy the computer room, how to manage the internet industry, the Big Mac has begun to pay attention to. And for the second-tier Internet companies, the server can be deployed, manageability requirements are increasingly high, for the half width and even more high-density server products, these customers are more and more acceptance.

"Large internet companies have their own design capabilities, small companies start lower and value prices, to meet the needs of both types of customers, is to provide low-cost customization of the Server a path." "China Hewlett-Packard Industry standard Server Product Marketing Director Liu Hongchen said. In his view, a large multinational server provider such as Hewlett-Packard is based on the demand of large internet companies, which can quickly reflect and design products in a shorter time when Chinese Internet companies produce similar needs. In contrast, domestic enterprises have more rapid local reflection capacity, and the traditional white card server manufacturers also have strong research and development capabilities and response speed, in the Internet industry driven by the traditional pattern of the server market will further towards the pillars situation.

In the previous distributed computing environment, the customer's demand is relatively dispersed, can not form the purchase demand, and no one is specially customized. And in the Internet industry and large cloud computing centers, tens of thousands of purchases can be directly with the server manufacturers to customize the project procurement. For some small Internet industry customers, their needs also have characteristics, but the demand has not reached a scale, no one to pay attention to.

In contrast, channels and small and medium-sized server manufacturers have a certain degree of flexibility, they can diversify into a number of small customers together, can also form thousands of, or even tens of thousands of units of the procurement scale, can also be customized. Therefore, in the small and medium sized Internet market, small and medium-sized server manufacturers and channels are more opportunities than large manufacturers.

In the new wave of the Internet, because of the trend of further centralization of server procurement, as a server seller, system integrators and solutions have not had as many opportunities as the first Internet wave. But for system integrators, the 20–30% growth rate of the Internet market every year is undoubtedly an excellent opportunity for development. Able to keep up with this wave, to maintain the size of users of the program, it is possible to lay the user base, to win the trust of the Internet industry. Although there is little loyalty in the industry, server channels are able to gain equal opportunities with vendors in Internet projects if they are able to continuously upgrade their local service capabilities during the sales process.

(Responsible editor: Liu Fen)