Snatching food from the tiger’s mouth: Is there any way out for telecom operators to do “cloud”?

[[382428]]

From the perspective of technological development, cloud is a trend and will play an important role in the coming 5G era. As we have seen, many of the attractive 5G applications described by the industry chain are mostly integrated into cloud services, such as cloud games, cloud phones, cloud offices, etc., especially cloud phones. In addition to some Internet companies such as Baidu launching related products, China Telecom has also launched Tianyi No. 1 cloud phone.

Perhaps seeing the future of cloud services, the three major telecom operators are paying more and more attention to cloud, especially China Telecom and China Mobile, which are determined to become cloud service providers.

For example, China Telecom's Tianyi Cloud has performed best in many previous rankings, ranking among the top five in the world, and has been ranked among the cloud services of many Internet companies.

China Mobile's official mobile cloud is extremely confident, and its introduction to the outside world is:

In the competition with "BAT Cloud", we are full of confidence in the future of Mobile Cloud. With the support of 5G, relying on China Mobile's basic resources, market services, and product technology advantages, and aiming at cloud native, Mobile Cloud is further committed to building a product system with differentiated competitiveness in cloud-network integration, cloud-data integration, cloud-edge integration, and cloud-intelligence integration. With the cloud as the hub, it connects the external application ecology and the internal capability ecology, rapidly expands the scale of integrated business, and leverages the resources of the industrial ecology. The brand slogan of Mobile Cloud is being upgraded from "5G era, the cloud around you" to "5G era, the smart cloud around you".

The rush of telecom operators to adopt cloud and 5G applications is a bit like the attempts to innovate services in the early days of 3G, such as China Telecom's eight major innovation bases, such as iMusic, iGame, and WingChat, but I have no idea which one was successful in the end. Will the current pursuit of cloud repeat the same mistakes? Although it is hard to say at present, in my personal opinion: it is better to move than not to move, and it is better to do than not to do.

However, industry insiders have sharp opinions on operators' cloud computing, and the opinions that are not optimistic about the other side are mainly concentrated in the following points:

1. If operators do not have the core technology for cloud business, they will inevitably be controlled by others, which will also seriously limit the development of operators' cloud business; of course, operators have always adopted the strategy of purchasing technology, but in the long run, this will definitely be subject to too many restrictions.

2. Companies like Azure, AWS, Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei are more professional in cloud computing. Operators cannot say that they have no advantages, but the main user groups of cloud services are currently enterprises, and there are not many individual users. The industry cloud applications of enterprise cloud service users are very vertical and personalized. When operators respond to and meet these vertical and personalized needs, the technical and skill levels of front-line personnel are not enough, and they are not as professional as the above-mentioned cloud service providers. And this point is difficult to change in the short term given the system of operators.

3. Operators’ salaries cannot support good development and they cannot recruit high-quality and high-level talents.

4. The three operators do not have the gene to do cloud computing. Although the operators can meet their own business development needs by doing cloud computing, from an external perspective, except for the government information projects that must be done for the operators, if we really consider the input-output ratio of information projects, the operators are definitely not BATH's opponents. As traditional CT companies, operators have always had shortcomings in IT. According to this netizen's opinion: the three major operators have some advantages except for IaaS, PaaS can only tie with ATB at most, and SaaS will be beaten to a pulp by ATB.

However, it does not mean that operators are not optimistic about cloud computing. In fact, many industry insiders are optimistic about the future of operators. For example, Internet companies that provide cloud services cannot build their own transmission networks due to national policy restrictions, so they must rent operators' infrastructure. Now operators are just adding services to the infrastructure, which has geographical advantages.

In addition, it is undeniable that operators’ cloud computing has a gap in professionalism compared to manufacturers, but for customers or businesses with less stringent demands, they can completely package cloud services into existing DICT projects. Instead of doing high-end 2b, they can only do 2b for the common people, which is still attractive to price-sensitive user groups.

Moreover, operators are pipelines and rivers. If the river is blocked to build a dam or a lake, there should be great opportunities.

The industry is arguing endlessly about operators' cloud computing. I wonder what you think of operators' cloud computing business?