Rhea Liu
According to a recent report from global market research company IDC, the cloud infrastructure market worldwide will grow by 24% in 2015. Expenditure on consumer cloud services alone will grow 24.1% to USD 32.6 billion.
IDC also predicts the public cloud market in China to reach RMB 24.67 billion (USD 3.92 billion) in 2016. This opportunity has certainly not gone unnoticed with China’s IT giants.
The BAT companies and Huawei have all made big moves into cloud services this year.
Alibaba
In a public letter to investors attached with Alibaba’s first annual financial report, Jack Ma said, “In the past six years, Alibaba has focused its enormous strategic investment in cloud computing and big data services.”
According to IDC’s findings, Alibaba’s cloud service, Aliyun, occupies 29.7% of the consumer cloud market in China, ranking number one. Aliyun had an income of RMB 485 million (USD 77 million) in the second quarter of this year, which saw it accomplish growth of 106% year-on-year, making its growth rate bigger than that of Amazon’s cloud service AWS.
Alibaba has already extended its service to various industries including the financial, medical services, energy, government and transportation industries. It’s also establishing new data centers in overseas markets including the U.S., the Middle East, Singapore and Europe.
It’s reported that Alibaba will establish its first data centre in Hong Kong this year followed after by a second data center in the U.S.
Price for a two core 8G cloud server:
China Service: RMB 268/298
Silicon Valley Service: RMB 276/358
Tencent
Another of China’s IT magnates, Tencent, is racing fast to catch up to Alibaba.
At a tech summit held by Tencent last month, Tang Daosheng, Tencent’s Senior Executive Vice President, announced that Tencent would invest RMB two billion (USD 317 million) in Tencent Cloud and would maintain investment at the same level over the next five years.
Tang also mentioned that Tencent’s Open Data is already the biggest data analytics platform in the world.
It is now processing over 56,000 trillion bytes every day and stores over 100 petabytes.
Tencent announced that the calculating speed of its premium cloud service will be promoted to 100,000 times per second, three times its current speed.
Tencent Cloud now focuses on the finance, video streaming and smart device sectors.
Price for a two core 8G cloud server:
RMB 320
Baidu
At a press conference in September, Baidu demonstrated its Baidu Open Cloud platform successfully defending itself against a DDoS attack. The DDoS attack saw peak traffic of 1Tbps attempting to shutdown Baidu Open Cloud but the platform’s resilience and advanced calculating capacity withstood the challenge and also established a new world record.
Baidu’s consumer cloud storage service has been operating for over three years but its open cloud service was only just announced at the Baidu World Conference last September.
Baidu claims that its cloud service is more than just cloud computing. At its world conference this year, Baidu claimed that “Baidu Open Cloud = Cloud Computing + Big Data + Artificial Intelligence,” revealing Baidu’s high expectations for its cloud service.
For the moment, Baidu Open Cloud services the website development, video streaming, data marketing, big data analysis and online education sectors.
Price for a two core 8G cloud server:
RMB 282
Huawei
Huawei announced its entry into the public cloud market at the end of July this year. It’s now operating five modules: city cloud, finance cloud, media resources cloud, industrial park cloud and software development cloud.
Though it only launched its public cloud service in July, Huawei’s research into cloud applications began in 2008 and became part of Huawei’s strategic plan in 2010.
Huawei claims it has five research centers focusing on the cloud worldwide with over 10,000 research staff. It also claims it invests each year a minimum of USD 500 million in the overall IT business .
Price for a two core 8G cloud server:
RMB 340
(Feature photo from Tencent Cloud)
