Entering China's public cloud market Microsoft in action

Cloud computing world is never calm, let alone the Chinese cloud computing market such a huge blue ocean. Since 2013, China's cloud computing market has been in a state of peat peat. March 26, Microsoft China announced the business of the Windows Azure Public cloud service, which is operated by the century interconnection. It was a year or two ago when Amazon, Microsoft and IBM announced their foray into China's public cloud market, and the first public cloud service platform, which was run locally by international manufacturers, was commercialized. Microsoft launched the first shot of the 2014 China Cloud War!

The temptation of China's public cloud market

China is a crazy market, China is already the world's largest PC, mobile phones, automobiles and other markets, and the vast potential in the cloud computing field, but also let the Chinese market by the industry it giants crazy pursuit.

Nearly 80% of Chinese companies in 2014 will invest more in cloud computing, according to Gartner survey data. IDC also released a forecast, the Chinese public cloud market size to 2016 will reach 24.67 billion yuan, the annual composite growth rate of 38.6%. From the industrial characteristics, the current domestic presence of IaaS "warlords and Up", PaaS "gradually grow", SaaS "still no giant" situation, cloud computing has become the foundation of China's Internet Innovation Entrepreneurship Platform, cloud computing flexible support capabilities in E-commerce, and the vertical industry penetration.

At the same time, the Chinese government has put cloud computing into the "Twelve-Five plan", the gradual landing of government business cloud will bring China's public cloud into a practical application stage. Although in this policy, regulation, the state-controlled market operation of public cloud services, the need to overcome the constraints of network connectivity, policy supervision, industry monopolies and other difficulties, and the global public cloud services in China's landing and face stringent national policy constraints, but these also do not stop Microsoft, IBM, The enthusiasm of the foreign giants such as Amazon for China's public cloud market! A battle to cut the cake for China's public cloud market has been quietly unfolding.

Quick Step Microsoft Windows Azure

Compared with Amazon, Microsoft is a successor in the public cloud, but it is the fastest-moving company in China's public-sector cloud market. June 2013, Microsoft through the domestic Internet infrastructure service provider-century interconnection, Windows Azure public cloud platform and services officially landed in China, until March 26 this year officially into commercial, is "rocket speed."

▲ Many Microsoft applications can be run on Windows Azure Service platform

Microsoft has positioned Windows Azure as "the best place to run Microsoft apps on the Cloud", one of the pioneers of a world-class cloud computing service platform. While Windows Azure's reputation and functionality in the public cloud area is still inferior to Amazon's AWS, Microsoft is still quite confident in China's public cloud market. You know, Microsoft has added many new features to its cloud services in the last year or two to try to make Windows Azure comparable to Amazon's AWS. Virtual machine enhancements such as Windows Azure add to the Distributed Cache System Preview (which allows users to use application or virtual machine cache visualization to enhance scalability and performance), as well as planned automatic scaling, while the hdinsights genetic algorithm, released last March, lets windows Azure's business intelligence features compete with the Flex map Reduce (EMR) of Amazon AWS and Google's bigquery.

Also, let us not forget that Microsoft has a Windows Server that is inextricably linked to Windows Azure. Although Windows Azure started out as a PAAs (platform-service), today's services are already IaaS (infrastructure, service) and PAAs, and the virtualized resources it provides are undoubtedly the same as Windows Server. As a result, Windows Azure has a natural appeal to those Windows Server users, who will become the backbone of Microsoft Windows Azure's continued growth, which is the first Chinese windows Azure must be a good thing.

"Pre-shop-back-plant" model, Amazon two-pronged

Microsoft Windows Azure, a growing territory, is only one representative of the various centaurs in China's public cloud market. Another it giant, Amazon, is eager to make inroads into the Chinese market – December 18, 2013, when Amazon announced a partnership with the new Halo network and the Internet, Amazon's Amazon Web Services (AWS) officially via China.

▲ Amazon with AWS Public cloud service in China

This is the tenth area that AWS has entered, spanning four continents, North America, South America, Europe and Asia. While launching the China Regional Cloud computing platform service, Amazon AWS has also cooperated with several government agencies, such as the signing of the Quartet Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Beijing municipal government and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the western cloud base, and the establishment and development of efficient, reliable and Economic Amazon AWS Cloud services. In Beijing and Ningxia, the two modes of cooperation have been named "former Shop (Beijing)-Back plant (Ningxia)" mode – the establishment of large data centers in remote areas with lower operating costs and the establishment of small data centers in or around the core area of the network services.

AWS, for example, has placed its own large data center in the Oregon State, and has set up a small data center in San Francisco, the Technology center, to ensure the needs of Silicon Valley's internet companies, and now the "Western Cloud base" in Beijing + Ningxia is using the same pattern.

Of course, the path to enter the Chinese market has been set, but Amazon AWS from the real "landing" there is a certain distance, after all, "see" and "useful" or two different things. In the future, will Chinese users get a discount on service categories, response speeds, service support and experience from Amazon AWS? I believe Amazon will give the answer in 2014.

Chasing IBM

In 2007, IBM released the "Blue Cloud" program, and gradually evolved into a wisdom cloud, during which IBM launched the SCE (SmartCloud Enterprise) and sce+ (SmartCloud enterprise+) two public cloud solutions, and has deployed 8 pods (point of IBuySpy, resource pools) in 6 data centers around the world. However, compared to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Windows Azure's "popular", IBM's sce/sce+ in the public cloud services market is still relatively weak voice. To this end, IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013 and combined its business with the SmartCloud Cloud service, which has been painstakingly built by IBM for many years, to migrate the SCE public cloud services, users, and so on to the SoftLayer platform, while maintaining a customizable, High-value IaaS service Platform SCE +。

The reforms eventually gave IBM a significant boost in the IaaS and PAAs sectors. So at a time of confidence, how can IBM be weak at this time when it comes to Microsoft and Amazon? IBM's China Public cloud strategy was also emerging last year – July 31, when IBM signed a long-term strategic partnership agreement with the capital on the public cloud. Opened the IBM in the Chinese market to provide public cloud service journey.

▲IBM also covets China's public cloud market

Cooperation with the capital online is mainly based on IBM enterprise-class public cloud platform technology, the introduction of the latest technology such as IBM Pureflex to build a more compliant with the Chinese user needs of the public cloud platform, covering IaaS, PAAs and SaaS three cloud computing models, to form a more complete lifecycle closed loop.

As for the sce+, the blue giant IBM has reached a cooperation agreement with the century interconnection, will sce+ formally into China. IBM provides the physical infrastructure resource pool pod and services, and Century interconnection will host the pod facility in its Beijing data center. Sce+ 's future focus is more on IaaS, focusing on the more complex, more critical workloads and applications that large enterprises manage in the cloud. According to IBM, its public cloud market in China has three directions: the first is Enterprise+softlayer's store service delivery model; The second direction is to build a cloud service system with local characteristics, which is operated by local service providers. The third direction is the cooperation model with the capital online, that is, the two sides jointly establish a "joint venture factory" and operate together.

"The Wolf is Coming", the Chinese regiment calmly responded

In the face of global IT giants in China to carry out public cloud services, domestic cloud service providers do not seem to fear the "wolf". As a result of policy and other reasons, domestic enterprises to the public cloud market open up the opportunity. Many domestic manufacturers have been actively providing public cloud services. Dawn has been "city Cloud" as a strategy to strengthen cooperation with the Government, and Wuxi, Chengdu, Baotou and other cities to sign the Urban Cloud Computing Center cooperation construction projects. The wave of "cloud" strategy focused on the "industry clouds", including government clouds, industrial and commercial clouds, health clouds, drug surveillance cloud, food safety cloud, etc. across more than 10 industries cloud applications, and has 25 cities and industries in the country signed the Cloud computing strategic Cooperation Agreement.

In addition, the company announced in July 2011, Aliyun to the independent development of the flying open platform based on the formal provision of cloud computing services, the goal is to build the first platform for Internet data sharing, to become a data-centric advanced cloud computing services company. At the beginning of 2013, Baidu also officially opened the application engine Bae, for all developers to launch a public network application development and deployment platform.

From the current situation of the domestic public cloud market, foreign manufacturers try to use the localization strategy, actively and partners to create ecological circle to open the market breakthrough, they are in the infrastructure and technology areas in the absolute dominance. But China's local public cloud services have not just started, China's cloud computing users have their own awareness and habits. Whether foreign cloud service products can provide more targeted, layered and diverse services in the Chinese market will determine if they can take root in the Chinese market as soon as possible, and take advantage of their brand and product strength to rapidly expand the market key factors.

Unlike foreign manufacturers, the domestic cloud service providers in the local customer demand for knowledge, prices and market segments have a congenital advantage, they can subdivide users, expand overseas business and other ways to make up their own short plate. and the domestic data center review is very strict, foreign giants in this area if the rapid advance, very easy to cause acclimatized, the current first from some of the original customer breakthrough may be to explore the operation of public cloud services in China skills. Especially last year, the "Go to IoE" incident has deepened the concern of foreign it giants, after the "prism door" incident, large state-owned enterprises, central Enterprise is considering replacing the original IBM, Oracle, EMC systems, if these large enterprises to put data on Amazon and Microsoft server, I'm afraid it's not easy. Therefore, it is still very difficult to say whether "foreign monks will chant" or "strong dragons cannot bully".