Operators are ready for the cloud computing market in 2019!

After nearly a decade of deployment in the cloud computing field, the three major operators have found that the situation is becoming complicated.

On the one hand, the favorable market situation has become clearer. According to relevant institutions, the global cloud computing market will reach US$411 billion in 2020. In recent years, my country's cloud computing has maintained an average annual growth rate of more than 30%, making it one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

In this context, the "Three-Year Action Plan for Cloud Computing Development (2017-2019)" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2017 proposed that by 2019, the scale of my country's cloud computing industry will reach 430 billion yuan. It is necessary to establish a cloud computing public service platform, support software companies to accelerate their transformation to cloud computing, increase efforts to cultivate key cloud computing companies, and establish an industrial ecosystem.

On the other hand, the advantages of the top players are further concentrated, and the gap is widening. According to Gartner data, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud maintained their top three positions in the global public cloud IaaS market in 2017, and their market share increased to 70.34% year-on-year. In China, Alibaba Cloud relied on its first-mover advantage and the rapid growth of small and medium-sized enterprise customers to maintain its advantage, with a market share of more than 45%, ranking first. The rest of the players can only compete for the second tier.

With both advantages and challenges, the future cloud computing path of the three major operators is full of variables.

Same goal, different strategies

Although they all aim to seize the domestic cloud computing market, their strategies and focuses are different.

China Mobile is committed to building a complete system at the three layers of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Therefore, it has been deeply engaged in the cloud-pipe-end strategy for a long time, starting from the development of internal private clouds to the evolution of external public clouds to provide services to the public, with the intention of forming an overall layout solution.

In the cloud, China Mobile has a large number of IDCs and cloud infrastructure, has established a big data analysis platform, and has developed a large number of industry solutions including education, medical care, Internet of Vehicles, e-government, etc. based on cloud, IDC and Internet infrastructure; in terms of network, it has a CDN network throughout the country, high-quality Internet access capabilities and rich transmission carrying capacity; in terms of terminals, it covers electronic products in the education field, smart medical care, Internet of Vehicles and other terminal equipment.

In 2014, China Mobile launched a public cloud platform (i.e., Mobile Cloud), covering the three-layer system of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, with more than 100 products in 18 categories, and also providing a large number of industry solutions. In August 2017, China Mobile officially launched its own cloud computing business platform "Big Cloud 4.0", including cloud computing, big data technology and platform products, with 26 core products such as Hadoop system, search engine, Pass platform, Big Cloud data center operating system, etc.

China Telecom focuses on all areas and strives to become the cloud operator that understands the Internet best and the Internet operator that understands the cloud best.

Since the official operation of Tianyi Cloud in 2012, China Telecom has achieved a 2+31 full coverage resource layout, with two ultra-large cloud resource pools in Inner Mongolia and Guizhou, covering an area of ​​2,000 mu and a planned capacity of 2 million servers, capable of providing a full range of cloud products. At the same time, in order to meet the needs of localized cloud resource deployment of government and enterprise customers, China Telecom has deployed resources in 31 provinces across the country and has currently deployed 75 cloud resource pools. According to IDC's latest report, Tianyi Cloud's domestic cloud computing market share has entered the top three, second only to Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud.

Compared with the platform and resource advantages of the first two, China Unicom chose to enter from the ecological perspective, focusing on building a new industrial chain through cloud computing, and establishing a platform to achieve multi-party cooperation and interaction, thereby discovering new markets.

Since the establishment of the "China Unicom Wo Cloud + Cloud Ecological Alliance" in 2016, China Unicom intends to promote the upgrade of cloud computing related standards, cloud computing industry applications, and industry services through the alliance. In March 2018, China Unicom launched 7 cloud-network integrated products for the domestic market, and all four major products, including cloud networking, cloud networking, cloud dedicated lines, and cloud broadband, have been SDN-based.

From private cloud to hybrid cloud: Moving towards public cloud

Although the strategies and paths of operators vary significantly, the development of cloud computing is showing a clear unified trend.

"As the industrial structure continues to optimize, the proportion of SaaS and PaaS continues to increase, and hybrid cloud has become a new support point for the industry." At the 2018 China Cloud Computing Conference, Zhang Feng, chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, pointed out the new situation currently faced by operators.

In recent years, enterprises have been increasingly willing to move to the cloud. According to a survey conducted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the willingness of Chinese enterprises to move to the cloud has been growing for three consecutive years from 2015 to 2017, with 34.7% of enterprises using public cloud, 13.4% using private cloud, and 6.6% using hybrid cloud.

This data proves the evolution of cloud computing: from private cloud to hybrid cloud and then to public cloud. This is also a consensus among operators.

"Enterprises cannot move to the cloud overnight. Core data requires private cloud hosting, and elastic needs are met by public clouds." Zhu Zifan, deputy general manager of the Cloud Network Collaboration Products Department of China Unicom Cloud Data Company, believes that when small and medium-sized enterprises grow to a certain scale, they hope to use heterogeneous public clouds. At the same time, enterprises' overseas nodes and domestic nodes have internal data interoperability needs. In addition, the high reliability needs of enterprise data also rely on multi-cloud dual active or multi-cloud disaster recovery.

Zhang Zhihong, deputy general manager of the cloud computing center of China Mobile's government and enterprise branch, said that in the future, public cloud will dominate the entire cloud computing field, but there will be a very long development stage. In this transitional stage, hybrid cloud is just a supplement to connect public cloud and private cloud as a whole. Hu Zhiqiang, general manager of China Telecom's cloud computing company, has a similar view. In his opinion, hybrid cloud is the choice of many customers at this stage, but in the long run, the public cloud model is a more economical and flexible model.

Data shows that the global public cloud market will have a compound growth rate of 16.3% from 2015 to 2021, and the domestic market will reach 30.7%, twice the global market. In 2021, the domestic public cloud market may reach 70 billion yuan.

Challenges in the 5G Era

Before moving into the public cloud market, operators clearly have a more pressing challenge in the field of cloud computing - 5G.

The "5G Technology White Paper" released by China Telecom points out that in the future, 5G will face challenges such as flexible network architecture, high-speed and low-latency requirements of efficient network bearer, etc. Cloud computing has the characteristics of large computing power, secure data storage, resource sharing, and low client requirements, which is undoubtedly the most powerful support for 5G.

"Without the development of cloud computing in recent years, it would be difficult for 5G to achieve the goal of commercialization in 2020." Zhang Zhihong revealed China Mobile's understanding of the relationship between cloud computing and 5G. He said that as early as 2014 when China Mobile started 5G research and development, it also established a development path for telecom cloud. In the 5G era, the entire software architecture will undergo great changes. 5G network components exist in the form of virtual machines. In fact, it is a special telecom cloud that supports the entire 5G infrastructure.

According to China Mobile's understanding of telecom cloud, a new network architecture will be formed by a new cloud-based data center, a new network with intelligent network scheduling, and a new brain with global network orchestration management. The integration of ICT technologies will build a new generation of network with globally schedulable resources, fully open capabilities, elastically scalable capacity, and flexibly adjustable architecture.

China Telecom also agrees with the relationship between 5G and cloud computing. Hu Zhiqiang said that China Telecom is already preparing to launch a test network to deeply integrate 5G technology and cloud computing technology. "This is also one of the competitive advantages of China Telecom's development," he said.

But there is another voice in the industry. "5G may not necessarily be the next explosion point for cloud computing. The next explosion point for cloud computing may be the Internet of Things." Zhu Zifan said that the core applications of enterprises are still based on the original infrastructure architecture, and the essence is still a problem between people. In the scenario of the Internet of Things, whether it is IP addresses or cloud computing resources, it is a blue ocean.

At present, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is accelerating the development of a new generation of information and communication technologies represented by cloud computing, comprehensively promoting deep integration with the real economy, and helping my country's economy achieve high-quality development. At the 2018 Cloud Computing Conference, Zhang Feng proposed to optimize the development environment, continue to implement the Broadband China strategy, further promote network speed increase and fee reduction, accelerate the pace of 5G commercialization, promote network evolution and upgrading, study and formulate policies and measures to promote high-quality development of the software industry in the new era, promote the innovative development of cloud computing and big data, further expand and upgrade information consumption, and gradually build a complete policy system.