Traditional business potential failure IDC Cloud trigger a new round of shuffle

Transform into the same theme that comes after the wave of cloud computing brings to each industry. Map to the IDC market, the operator transformation sound continues to strengthen. In the recent 517 telecom days, China Unicom officially launched the long prepared virtual data center VDC, providing enterprises with flexible cloud computing, cloud host, cloud storage and cloud Terminal Services.

Coincidentally, China Telecom launched the cloud storage and cloud host business in 2010 years, and in Shanghai and other regions to carry out commercial trial. September 2011, China Telecom launched the Sky Wing cloud computing strategy, this year's first phase will provide 20,000 high-performance virtual hosts, storage capacity of 20,000 TB of IAAS services.

At the same time, third-party IDC operators have also set foot on the road of transformation, including the representative enterprise million network, the world's data and century interconnection, and so on the forefront, has or is about to launch cloud computing services.

"Cloud computing as a way to reduce the overall operating cost of IDC, the IDC industry will have a profound impact on the transition is the trend." Cao Ru, the project manager of China Unicom IDC Operations Center, said in an interview with reporters from the communications industry newspaper.

The trend of change

In fact, the first wave of IDC transformation is not the traditional IDC operators, but the world's largest online book retailer Amazon. Today, it is known as the "originator" of the cloud computing industry by the industry, and its EC2 and S3 businesses are being emulated by most IDC operators.

The initial EC2 was designed for Amazon to support its main business of online book retailing. At the time, Amazon began deploying IT infrastructure throughout the United States, including servers, storage, and bandwidth resources. To fully support business development, these resources are a redundant form of deployment.

Amazon then rents rich IT resources to third-party users, a lucrative business. At the beginning of 2006, Amazon set up the Network Service Department (AWS), the official launch of the user EC2 cloud services. Amazon then launched the cloud storage business, which was named S3.

At present, Amazon's EC2 and S3 business has reached the scale of 15 million virtual machines, each year for Amazon to bring 120 million of dollars in revenue. Although this figure accounts for less than 10% of total Amazon revenue, the outlook is expected to be a business with great potential.

Amazon is not the only company to profit from cloud computing services. Rackspace, one of the three largest cloud computing centers in the world. Founded in 1998, with more than 10 data centers worldwide, managing more than 64000 servers. It provides users with cloud services such as cloud hosting, security, and e-mail. Up to 50,000 servers, storage capacity of 1PB per month, and incremental, each year to bring it 60 million of dollars of revenue.

The wave also swept into the country two years ago. With cloud computing in the domestic roots, the leading IDC operators began to plan transformation. Today, the transition has been fruitful.

Sun Gang, vice president of universal data, leads the cloud computing Development Department and is fully responsible for the advancement of the universal data cloud strategy. In an interview with reporters, he said that the company United Japan SoftBank Telecom company has officially launched the core based on VMware Vcloud Datacenter Technology of the high available cloud data center, not only to provide users with CPU, memory, storage, network, and other IT resources flexible on-demand services, You can also bring new virtual resource pool services to your users.

He told reporters that many business users have expressed interest in this business of the data, and intend to introduce it in the near future. "It's a kind of encouragement for us to do a cloud service." "Sun Gang said.

Cannan, deputy general manager of China Unicom's IDC Operations center, also told reporters that the VDC launched by China Unicom has been successfully settled by users and is starting to profit. But the specific income figures are inconvenient to disclose.

In addition, according to the reporter understand, million network launched cloud host business, has thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises to choose. And China Telecom as the biggest leader of the market, early in the cloud service trial commercial period will harvest the first bucket of gold. Taiwan's banking sector accelerated its entry into the mainland after the two sides signed the Financial Regulation (MOU) and the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA). China Telecom's first bucket of gold comes from providing IT infrastructure services.

Sun Gang to reporters, IDC cloud services can quickly get the market recognition, it is that it solves many enterprises do not have much money to build the information infrastructure of the trouble. Due to the purchase of hardware and software and other products one-time investment is very large, late operation and maintenance costs are very expensive. Some enterprises, especially SMEs, are unable to afford this high cost. and cloud services just meet their needs.

It is benefiting from the "financial cloud" services provided by Shanghai Telecom, the first Taiwan bank to enter the mainland. Shanghai Telecom Senior engineer Liu in the media interview, said, such as Taiwan's first bank scale, if the core system, one-time hardware and software investment at least tens of millions. The rental of "financial cloud" services, only pay monthly fee per month, saving costs at least 2/3. Moreover, the deployment of the entire system will be reduced from the original 4 months to 1 weeks.

And then to bring convenience to the enterprise at the same time, the transformation also makes the IDC operators from the extensive type of trusteeship services to the refinement of the operation.

Facing a new round of shuffle

The traditional IDC business can be divided into basic business and value-added service, in which the basic business is hosted primarily by host. As far as the current domestic IDC market structure is concerned, the basic business is still the absolute mainstream of the data center market demand, accounting for more than 90%.

Due to the excessive concentration of basic business, the domestic IDC industry homogeneous competition is increasingly fierce. However, with the advent of the cloud computing era, the entire IDC market or will face shuffle.

Cao Ru to reporters: "Cloud computing will have a profound impact on the competitiveness of the IDC industry, the IDC industry also has the possibility of shuffling." In particular, he pointed out that the current basic telecommunications business to private capital further open, the future of the IDC business license may be reissued, therefore, the IDC industry competition will become more intense.

Sun Gang to reporters the same point of view, "whether the IDC industry will reshuffle needs to depend on the situation, but the cloud must reshape the entire IDC industry competition." ”

In the past, the traditional IDC business threshold is low, only have a piece of land resources, can carry out host hosting business. So 10 years ago, when the Internet wave came, countless small and medium-sized IDC operators entered the market. There are successes and failures, but there are many small IDC in the market.

However, the future of the IDC market will be in the hands of the technical faction.

To provide cloud services, the first step is to build a complete cloud data center. "Because the cloud data center is not just a site, it's a hub for servers, storage, and network resources." Therefore, building a cloud data center requires huge investment. These funds are not owned by SMEs. "Sun Gang said.

Second, the latter to provide users with sophisticated management and operational maintenance services. "The quality of service directly affects the customer's trust and loyalty." Therefore, only the enterprises with the advantage of service can obtain more customer recognition and understanding, it is possible to occupy a dominant position in the market. And the service advantage is often the small and medium-sized IDC does not have "Cao Ru to the reporter elaborated the second main reason."

Therefore, in the next 3-5 years, the IDC market, the existing large-scale and technical areas of greater innovation will win. This will include the network resource advantages of the three major operators and large IDC enterprises. And those small IDC or will gradually fade out of this stage.

or suffer transition pains

And foreign situation is different, the domestic cloud service market is still in the early stages of development, and this means that some have already embarked on the transition road IDC operators or will encounter the transition period.

Sun Gang to reporters: "The traditional IDC background, as long as the establishment of the site and wind water and electricity can be put into operation." In the context of cloud services, it is a time-consuming project to establish a complete IT infrastructure facility. This also represents the cloud data center background, input-output return than can take longer. Initially, it is inevitable that we will face losses. ”

In fact, in any new business, companies need to bear the cost of idle. In economics, the cost of idle cost enterprises when production capacity is idle. It is the basic inevitable cost of the enterprise, such as rent, interest, depreciation expenses under the law of Life and so on. "It can be seen that the new cloud IDC's idle cost is necessarily higher than the traditional IDC." "Sun Gang said.

However, because cloud computing itself is to achieve the effective allocation of resources and utilization, in the long run, the cloud IDC investment return ratio is certainly higher than the traditional IDC. "Therefore, even if the initial loss, we will not shrink." This will be a model of sustainable development. "Sun Gang's words represent the voice of IDC operators in the transition period.

A careful analysis of these current operators in the forefront of the transition, they launched the cloud services is the cloud host, cloud storage and other services. So some experts worry that the homogenization of competition will be staged again.

In this respect, Cao Ru said: "Although at present, the IaaS level of service form will be relatively simple, less service types." But this is also a feature of the IAAS layer service. The simplest services and products are often the hardest to do. such as cloud host IaaS level services and products will produce very fierce competition, to truly develop a good cloud computing services, must be in the ' refined ' word. ”

Sun Gang said: "At the beginning, there may be homogeneity competition, but as time changes, things will change." Because each enterprise's solution varies widely, the market position is also different, so some people will win, some people would fail, and the winning companies would eventually move to the fine road of operation. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)