The leading cloud service manufacturers in China are actively embracing big data to inject vitality into their cloud computing business.
At the beginning of 2021, Tencent has made new moves in the field of big data. Big data company Star Ring Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., LTD. (hereinafter referred to as "Star Ring") has signed an agreement with China International Capital Corporation to list on the Science and Technology Innovation Board.
Tencent was the biggest institutional investor in Star Link before its IPO, and Orient Jinxin, a big data company with hundreds of millions of yuan in investment, has entered the IPO coaching stage. The cooperation between Tencent, Star Ring Technology and Orient Jinxin has one thing in common: building a big data ecology based on Tencent's cloud capabilities.
While Tencent frequently invests in big data companies, the application of Ali Cloud's "city brain" in big data is also on the fast track. After ten years of development, the big data industry of the giants has reached a climax.
Tencent and Alibaba take on Big data
Tencent and Alibaba, two big factories, from the water of big data so far, have gone through a decade.
Ten years ago, wechat was just popular, many people know Taobao, but not familiar with Alibaba. A decade later, Tencent has leveraged its comparative advantage in social data to make its mark in big data. Alibaba laid a solid data foundation for the layout of big data business through Taobao, and became Alibaba and Ali Cloud as they are known today.
At the Tencent 2020 Techo Park Developer Conference, Jiang Jie, vice president of Tencent Cloud and general manager of Tencent Data Platform Department, said that after 10 years of accumulation, the computing resource pool of Tencent Big data platform has exceeded 200,000 units, and the daily real-time data calculation volume exceeds 3 trillion.
Tencent's big data resource pool is built on its own product ecology. In terms of product types, Tencent's big data products are mainly divided into three categories: analysis, tools and platform. The analysis category includes Tencent mobile analysis, wechat small program analysis, etc., which can conduct real-time statistics and instant analysis to improve the efficiency of product decision-making; Tools include Tencent Mobile Push (carrier pigeon), cloud database, etc., using high-performance open source database to assist users to quickly develop business; Platforms include big data processing suite, Tencent intelligent recommendation, etc., which endows users with the ability of big data processing and accurate recommendation.
It can be seen that these three kinds of big data products of Tencent are built around the Internet platform, and the main service groups are concentrated in the Internet applications such as Singing Bar, 36kr, Jingdong Home and Tencent's own product ecology. Such a strategy can enhance the ability of the main business, while conducive to the construction of their own Internet application ecology.
In the past three years, Tencent has successively invested in Star Ring Technology and Orient Jinxin, and said that it will form complementary advantages with the two big data companies in finance, government, industry and other aspects based on Tencent Cloud's basic product capabilities in cloud computing and big data, and jointly build a big data ecosystem. Tencent is taking the integrated development of "cloud + big data" as a strategy to enhance its technical strength and influence and expand the market of big data industry.
If Tencent's focus is on products, Alibaba's is on data management. Alibaba's self-research ability in big data and its expansion ability in the cloud market show strong performance. In 2010, Alibaba launched Maxcompute(formerly ODPS) to start the construction of big data. It is committed to the storage and calculation of batch structured data, and provides massive data warehouse solutions and analysis and modeling services.
It is known that after ten years of development, MaxCompute has been able to carry EB-level data storage capacity and 100 petabytes of single-day computing capacity. On the public cloud, more than a dozen countries and regions at home and abroad have been covered. Enterprises in many industries such as e-commerce, industry, medical care, agriculture, meteorology, and education have begun to adopt this technology.
Aliyun's star product, City Brain, is better known than MaxCompute.
In 2009, Jack Ma and Wang Jian hit it off and founded Alibaba Cloud. Wang Jian then plunged into the deep reef of big data with numerous doubts and derision. Ma was right about Wang Jian, and Wang Jian lived up to Ma's 1 billion yuan R&D investment. Today, more than 20 cities around the world have introduced Ali Cloud "city brain", covering 11 fields such as transportation, urban management, cultural tourism and health. Ali Cloud "city brain" uses big data to solve past problems with data, and data resources will become a very important factor in future city development.
The success of City Brain today cannot be achieved without the combination of MaxCompute's powerful computing power and Ali Cloud computing.
Zhou Zhengang, assistant vice president of IDC China, pointed out in an interview with China Electronics News that cloud platforms currently provide powerful computing and storage capabilities for big data management and mining. From the technical point of view, the current data warehouse and data lake technology on the public cloud is the development focus of each manufacturer. Many vendors are also considering "silo and lake" solutions, which are the unified management of structured and unstructured data.
Big data is responsible for efficiently processing data and enriching the capacity of cloud computing; Instead, cloud computing can leverage the power of big data to build demand. Tencent and Alibaba have been deeply engaged in the field of big data for a decade, which has witnessed the complementary development of "cloud + big data".
"Cloud + big data" will be deeply integrated
With the continuous enhancement of cloud awareness of enterprises and the continuous improvement of cloud security technology, more and more enterprises are willing to migrate data storage and systems to the cloud, data center service providers began to actively promote the cloud of data center, cloud computing service providers have launched big data solutions, cloud computing and big data integration degree is deepening.
"Cloud computing can provide bigger storage space and stronger computing power for big data, so that the value of big data can be truly released." Ccid Consulting Big Data Industry Research Center senior analyst Zhang Fan said in an interview with China Electronics News. The integrated development of cloud computing and big data is more suitable for the application scenarios that need to obtain valuable information through the calculation and analysis of large amounts of data, such as the collaboration of various manufacturing links in the manufacturing industry, the precise mining of user needs based on the optimization of production link data, and many links in the medical field, such as gene sequencing, vaccine research and development, and drug development.
From the perspective of IT construction, the current enterprise cloud is basically an active behavior, the slower the action will be more passive. Wan Xiangyu, a researcher at the Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out to China Electronics News that the digital transformation of the whole industry is accelerating, and enterprises' demand for data is deepening. Under the condition of reasonable cost and benefit, cloud-based big data services will be the ideal choice for enterprises' future IT construction.
Talking about how to make a breakthrough in business value through the integration of cloud computing and big data, both Wan Xiangyu and Zhang Fan mentioned business intelligence, which uses modern data warehouse technology, online analysis and processing technology, data mining and data presentation technology to conduct data analysis, so as to help the management of enterprises to make rapid and accurate decisions, quickly discover problems in enterprises and prompt managers to solve them. Zhang Fan pointed out that, in addition, the use of "cloud + big data" technology to shorten the product research and development cycle and improve the operation efficiency of enterprises can also create commercial value for enterprises to some extent.
Talking about the problems and challenges, Zhou Zhengang believes that data privacy and data control are the main difficulties in the development of big data at the level of public cloud. Users now pay more and more attention to the issue of data privacy. Different countries and regions have introduced different laws and regulations on data privacy management. Being able to control the location of data to comply with data privacy regulations will be a key decision-making criterion when users choose cloud service providers. Companies need to assess data privacy risks on cloud platforms and allow cloud service providers to analyze, mine and present data in a privacy-friendly manner, while cloud service providers need to be able to support complex data audits through analytics tools.
Zhang Fan believes that the current integration of cloud computing and big data, on the one hand, needs to solve the problem of imperfect policies and regulations in data right confirmation, sharing and opening, privacy protection, etc., on the other hand, it faces the challenge of how to better improve data security technology and how to develop customized solutions more suitable for specific business scenarios.
Whether it is Tencent, Ali, or any cloud manufacturer that actively embraces big data, if we want to make the technology grow healthily and the product truly serve users, we should not only pay attention to our own growth, but also see the problems caused by the application of technology and eliminate users' doubts about the product. This is the problem that every emerging technology will encounter in the process of productization. They could be the key challenges Tencent and Alibaba face as they head into the next big data decade.
