How many cloud computing companies can survive?

How many cloud computing companies can survive?

At present, many enterprises are doing cloud computing, including Internet enterprises represented by BAT, equipment vendors represented by Huawei /H3C/ Cisco /IBM/ Hewlett-Packard/Dell/Lenovo (providing products in the form of hardware such as servers, network devices and storage devices), IT service providers such as Redhat/Oracle (mainly providing software parts in solutions or integrated solutions), and cloud computing-based startups represented by Ucloud; In addition to the hardware or software needed for computing, storage and networking in the field of cloud computing, the most important form of cloud computing products provided by these enterprises is to provide the overall scheme and management platform for building a cloud computing platform, that is, under what framework these cloud computing devices are combined through the network architecture to ensure that the cloud computing platform provides robust cloud computing functions, high scalability and high availability on the basis of high stability, and provides a set of management platform for cloud platform operators and customers to apply, pay, use and manage their own resources in the cloud platform. Looking at so many industries in the big wave of cloud computing, which companies will survive?

Only the future time can accurately answer this question, but history has an amazing repetition of polls. The IT industry has developed for decades, and some clues can be inferred from the recent technological development. Looking back on history, the transmission of effective information can bring value to people's society. Limited by the development of information transmission technology and information processing technology, the information industry has not developed too fast until the emergence of computers. However, in the whole process of promoting information development, the appearance of computers has not jumped out of the ranks of information development. It still sifts useful information through the complicated and chaotic society, then processes and predicts it in time, and is mastered by some people, concentrating resources on creation. This kind of prediction is nothing more than finding innovation or creation suitable for the current social state, demand and technical constraints; The development of new things also needs the right time, place and people, because many new technologies or model innovations in history died at the wrong time. Here we need to analyze the development of information technology and even society after the emergence of computers: our most basic necessity is human consumption, and the premise of human consumption is to obtain consumption capital and consumption objects through production activities (not necessarily my own production activities). This production and consumption process needs to be matched, and the matching process is the essential function of information generation, processing, transmission and value creation. The faster the information flow, the faster the people's production and consumption process will be, and the greater the production capacity will be.

At the beginning, information communication was nothing more than personal communication (sound, ignition), and the communication process was to use natural objects (such as listening to sound and seeing fire); The process of storage shows the memory of the human brain, and then knots the record. With the development of mankind, more and more knowledge and information need to be accumulated, and the newly generated information is faster and faster, so there is a greater and faster requirement for the storage and transmission of information processing, so there are information storage technologies such as hard disks after books are displayed, information transmission technologies such as switches and optical fibers, and information processing technologies of various powerful computers, including information compression and decompression, encryption and decryption, etc. The so-called big data now is nothing more than accumulating human information through better storage technology, with good experience accumulation and a lot of undiscovered value content. It is necessary to analyze and summarize the deeper information content through data mining technology, and guide the subsequent social development through transcendental theory.

So how is information reflected in society? From the current division of labor, the processor industry represented by Intel and AMD, the chip industry represented by Broadcom and Qualcomm, and some basic industries of the disk industry have formed, and then the sub-server production industry represented by Dell/IBM/HP/EMC (including computing servers and storage services) and the network equipment manufacturers represented by Cisco and Huawei have emerged. Then, on the basis of servers, storage devices and network devices, at first, it was a communication industry operator represented by telegraph, telephone and television, and later, with the emergence of Internet companies, it provided information in multimedia information format. The public part of the Internet is based on the DC and link bandwidth provided by operators, and some of it belongs to the self-built category. At first, operators' services were judged as two communication modes complementary to Internet services. However, with the development and integration of ICT technology, especially the emergence of OTT services such as WeChat, the services of operators are gradually replaced by Internet companies based on their own multimedia information. The so-called "internet plus" thinks that the integration of the Internet and basic industries (food, clothing, housing, transportation and play) is not enough, and hopes to advocate the integration of cloud computing, big data and more traditional manufacturing industries, thus promoting greater information flow and creating more social wealth.

In this development process, the business develops very fast, and the demand for servers, storage devices and network devices is huge, so that people forget to think about how to optimize the use, because on the one hand, the scale has not reached today's order of magnitude at first, on the other hand, people have encountered too many problems to solve and have no leisure to optimize. Today, when servers, storage devices and network devices are basically mature, the emergence of many technologies has solved the original intractable diseases well, but the scale problem brought by the increasing scale has attracted people's attention. Here, on the one hand, it is a cost problem, on the other hand, it is a management problem brought by scale. Therefore, from the perspective of innovation, the so-called architecture optimization SDN scheme of cloud computing or network is only an optimized technical scheme, which can't be innovated to a certain extent. it also shows that the development of IT technology or mode has encountered great bottlenecks and is in a stable and prosperous stage; This stage is only used to optimize and prepare for the problems brought by the next stage of technological breakthrough. With the prevalence of open source code and the development of hardware open architecture, it seems that the research and development of servers, switches and storage devices is not so difficult now, but it needs to be accumulated in a certain industry to make stable and satisfactory devices. This phenomenon in the domestic market, many innovations have not yet involved the most basic areas of the IT industry, such as CPU.

The problem of scale is nothing more than the problem of performance. On the one hand, the optimization in this aspect is to improve the performance of equipment or system, including business performance and management performance (I came back to deal with business performance, so here I mainly focus on management performance, that is, the stability problem caused by performance); The other is the cost problem, which is nothing more than centralizing resources, comprehensively managing them through multiple virtual physical technologies, and then virtualizing them on top of virtualization to realize customized service arrangement, flexible use and expansion of computing, network and storage resources, thus achieving cost savings; Another benefit is that in operation and maintenance, through this process of one virtual and many virtual, the underlying faults can be shielded through various highly available schemes, and physical equipment is no longer required to run 7*24 hours. And these aspects need cloud computing to obtain.

As far as the services provided by IT companies are concerned, Internet companies are directly facing customers (it's hard to say whether they can launch products that can replace the mobile phone services of operators in the future, but personally, it's not difficult), and there are many kinds of social information, which makes the types of services they provide particularly numerous, which requires Internet companies to keep up with the development of new industries, constantly explore the Internet channels of traditional industries, and realize the continuous increase of business; This is a realistic demand, so it is necessary for Internet companies to support and promote cloud computing. As long as any internet company (essentially an advertising company) needs a large-scale server, cloudization becomes an inevitable requirement; In other words, Internet companies will consider cloud computing as long as they live to a certain stage (but they don't have to use virtual machines like Openstack). On the basis of their own business migrating to the cloud platform, if this cloud platform is developed and operated by themselves, it is easy to provide services for similar businesses, because they have accumulated a lot of experience in cloud platform operation, and AWS and Alibaba Cloud are good examples in this respect. The products developed by internet programmers are mostly deployed on their own platforms for customers to use, and rarely can be widely promoted to other industries or even other companies in the same industry. Even if these products are wrong or eliminated, they just bite their teeth and swallow them, and will not embarrass customers because they provide information services rather than specific products.

For operators, if there are no telephone communication customers and internet communication facilities, it is likely to disappear; In the current cloud-based scenario, it is just right to build a cloud platform to provide cloud-based services for traditional industries, so as long as no operator misses the opportunity, it can still occupy a place in cloud computing.

For equipment manufacturers, they are mainly oriented to the Internet and operators, and most of them have experience in facing big customers. The operation mode is to develop stable products according to demand and then iterate repeatedly; Under the development trend of cloud computing, it is more important to provide cloud platform solutions and corresponding equipment for operators and internet companies on the basis of accumulated sales service experience and customer relationship; If it wants to be in the field of cloud computing, on the one hand, it needs to change its thinking, because the mode of cloud computing needs constant innovation, and the thinking mode of equipment manufacturers also needs to change. On the other hand, it is necessary to accelerate the recruitment of cloud computing talents through recruitment, enhance the ability to provide solutions to the Internet and operators with their own equipment, and accelerate the pace of transformation. Therefore, if equipment vendors can grasp this point, they can also succeed in the field of cloud computing.

There are also some companies that start businesses by cloud computing, some are successful, such as Ucloud under the leadership of the famous Benjurry Ben, and some are in the field of cloud computing in the form of corporate entrepreneurship; For the departmental entrepreneurship of large companies, large companies can lay a good foundation for the cloud sector and provide high-quality resources through existing funds and customers, so even if it fails, it will not affect the main business of the whole company. After all, even if the company's business cannot be migrated to its own cloud platform, there are still so many public and private cloud solutions available. For a completely self-made entrepreneur, there is neither the accumulation of original equipment nor the support of so much money. It is more of an integrator's role, and its opportunity lies in the game that entrepreneurs will grasp the development trend of the industry and traditional related companies are slow to respond. If you can get investment, get customers and remember the corresponding service experience in a short time, you are likely to succeed. But in the future, you need to constantly innovate the business model and service model based on cloud computing, otherwise it will be rapidly innovated.

When it comes to startups, it should be noted that startup partners must have experience in making products, not just programmers; Programmers may write good code quickly, but it is not necessarily a good product; Some programmers, in particular, think that a program is just writing code, and they can develop products even without industry accumulation, but they don't know that writing code is just a personal tool like doing arithmetic problems. The most important thing is personal accumulation in this industry. This kind of programmer who thinks that any industry can write good code can be qualified for the post is basically an unreliable programmer, because he has not realized the true meaning of writing programs and can't understand the real difference between IT engineers and programs. The technological atmosphere of entrepreneurship in China is also very poor. The emergence of many new services often becomes the tools of the company's commercial speculation concept, such as SDN (it can be clearly said that many developers of so-called SDN products in existing companies didn't even know what the abbreviation of SDN was when developing), and many existing technologies moved to the cloud platform, with new names, which are said to be the first in the industry. This phenomenon can be found everywhere; How to correctly understand the direction of entrepreneurship, stick to it, respond to market promotion, and quickly update products and services is the fundamental way to win survival. The more companies in the technology circle speculate, the guilty thing is that there is no new content in technology. For programmers or companies that recruit programmers, the influence of Bill Gates and others on academic qualifications has made programmers with low academic qualifications chicken blood, but in reality, how many programs eventually became Bill Gates? The vast majority of company executives are highly educated; Moreover, wITh the it project getting bigger and bigger, it basically needs a group of people to complete it, and the communication cost of a group of people with similar academic qualifications will be significantly reduced, which is also a reason why many IT companies value academic qualifications in recruitment. Moreover, in probability, people with high academic qualifications are more likely to be competent than those with low academic qualifications, and recruiting employees with high academic qualifications also reduces the risk of recruitment mistakes for the company, although it is not strictly required.

In short, there are many cloud computing enterprises now, similar to when the Internet was just popular, but now it is by no means the first batch; A large number of cloud computing industries will also die, and then new cloud computing companies will appear and become bigger. This phenomenon of constant illness and death has also accelerated the development of society and industry. Moreover, these ultimately winning cloud computing companies will also divide their industries, so that they can have a good development in their own fields. The market share of their industry depends on the specific capabilities of each company!