Foxconn combined with HP: What does the cloud market intend to do?

Today, Hewlett-Packard issued an official message: 1 billion union Foxconn into the cloud computing battlefield. A lot of people do not quite understand Foxconn this move is what the Abacus, the author recently collected some information about Foxconn, from which may be able to see the clue.

What does Foxconn do in half a month?

In addition to Hewlett-Packard, Foxconn has done a lot of things in the past half month, with three things that are largely confusing.

1. Hon Hai is spending billions of dollars to buy Asia-Pacific Telecom Stakes.

Why does Hon Hai, a foundry, buy a telecoms company? You may not know much about Asia-Pacific Telecom, a company that provides low-cost telecommunications services in Taiwan, where users can talk to other Asia-Pacific users for free. This attracts a lot of young people to use, but when it comes to the problem of unlimited traffic, Asia-Pacific tariffs are similar to other telecommunications: This shows that the Asia-Pacific base station can carry large-scale free calls, but can not carry large-scale Internet services.

Even so, the Asia-Pacific region in Taiwan has more than 3,000 base stations, coverage on the island of Taiwan is outstanding, which can help Hon Hai to promote the popularization of 4G network. You might ask, "Did you just say that Asia-Pacific has a poor capacity for massive Internet services?" Yes, but with the technical support of Hon Hai behind the scenes, it is only necessary to make changes to the original infrastructure, and the Asia-Pacific is relatively cheap compared to several other large telecoms companies: the best price-performance ratio. As you can see, Hon Hai has turned its target to internet services.

2. Foxconn wants to be in the enterprise server and storage market

At the end of last month, the Wall Street Journal made a report about it. Foxconn is Apple's biggest foundry, with most of its revenue coming from the OEM iphone and ipad. But with orders falling for several key customers, Foxconn is expanding into the corporate market, targeting servers and storage operations.

Although Foxconn can not be regarded as a mere substitute factory, but its main source of profit is the foundry, now this profit is reduced, must want to exit. At this point, Foxconn faces the same problems as a small manufacturing plant, with its main customers reducing orders and making less profit. In this case, the enterprise will consider the transformation, the small factory may not have enough resources to change, but Foxconn absolutely have the confidence. Foxconn also revealed at this time that it had already got HP's orders.

3. Mr. Gou said: Foxconn plans to complete the transition in 2020

Foxconn's chairman, Terry Gou, said Foxconn would complete the transition by 2020. Foxconn is now not only a manufacturing plant, but also a "machine to machine" company.

Mr Gou hopes that future factories will be more intelligent and that the system will automatically track the depreciation of the equipment and make recommendations accordingly. "Machine to Machine" this concept is to let the author feel a "factory things networking feeling." Mr Gou also said it could streamline people and raise staff levels: simply to cut costs.

The author of the above three events is in fact flashbacks, that is, Gou first proposed a transformation, and then proposed to expand the enterprise services, plans to buy the Asia-Pacific, and finally and HP cooperation.

Cloud computing Services Battlefield----Enterprise is the customer

Google joined the market scramble for cloud computing earlier this year, but became a laggard. The statistics show Amazon AWS has more revenue than all cloud computing rivals combined. Google, of course, is nervous, acquiring a cloud monitoring service start-up, Stackdriver. And who was the client before the company was acquired? Amazon AWS: The war in the cloud-computing market may be more intense than we think.

Some time ago IBM launched a large enterprise-class data system, is also pushing storwize cloud storage products. Cisco worked out a cloud computing service in March this year, preparing to spend $1 billion for the next two years. At the same time, Microsoft says it will increase the amount of cloud storage available to enterprise users to 40 times times the size of the original. From these points, we can see that the Battle of cloud computing may be too far from US consumers, because the face of the customers are enterprises.

The addition of Hewlett-Packard is certainly making the war even more intense: especially after the combination of Foxconn. HP had already known about the company's software and enterprise-class servers in the early years, and that "business is the customer". So HP's entry into the battlefield is understandable.

So what are HP and Foxconn thinking?

From HP's point of view, they have long understood the "business is Customer" truth, as the internet giant expansion, into the cloud is inevitable, so support the expansion of the hardware is a piece of pie, they must win. When it comes to hardware, Foxconn, the size of Foxconn, predicts that its customers will eventually be businesses, which coincides with HP.

From Foxconn's point of view, with its own technology and size, it is entirely by the ability to serve the enterprise, but the question is: do not do consumer electronics do? So at this time, the company also wants to serve HP, and internet companies are competing for the cloud computing market, HP has the experience of designing servers, Fuji Kang Manufacturing Experience , the two cooperation is "strong together."

In addition, no matter how many patents Foxconn says it is, others always feel it is only a factory, plus the main customer orders down, in order to change the image, changing the runway reasons, Foxconn plans to transition. To put it simply, Foxconn plans to work with Hewlett-Packard to keep the plant running and to put extra money into its "machine to machine" plan.

For both, making corporate money and making computers for the public, mobile phones can be different. Enterprise Server and storage unit price higher, and supporting the installation, maintenance services can be charged, the other server is mostly long-term use, upgrade updates need to find the original manufacturers: This is a good thing for HP. As long as Foxconn has the ability to bring costs down, it can eat the pie with HP. It sounds like Hewlett-Packard is making a profit, but the author's mission is not just money but more business change.

The author thinks, HP invests cloud service market is very normal, but the change of Foxconn is worth studying very much. A sudden shift in the market may be confusing, but in fact Foxconn has always been around the core of "manufacturing" to lay out the business. In terms of manufacturing, Huawei and Heshuo are strong, and Foxconn will lose its first position if it does not make changes in manufacturing.

In addition to cloud computing and the layout of the cloud services market, Foxconn has a number of other gestures, such as Innoconn and Kick2real. All this means that Foxconn is not only upgrading its foundry technology, but also seriously thinking about what it should "make". In fact, the manufacturing industry itself is driven by products, first think what to do, and then optimize production technology: Foxconn's transformation is in line with the logic of manufacturing. In the author's opinion, Foxconn and HP are not "doing nothing".