CLOUD

The year 2011 marked profound changes in the global ICT market. Technological innovations and transformation of business model represented by cloud computing and mobile Internet moved to change people’s lives. Products represented by iCloud of Apple Computer and Cloud Drive of Amazon, combined cloud computing with mobile Internet and brought mobile cloud service based on mobile Internet into being. In China’s cloud service market, K-Touch, Huawei and Yulong introduced cloud-concept cell phones; Baidu unveiled Baidu Yi, a cloud service platform based on mobile Internet; telecom operators are also pressing ahead with their own cloud service products. All these facts indicate that China’s mobile cloud service has entered a new period.

Integration service will be an important form for traditional Internet enterprises to promote cloud service.

iCloud combines Apple’s music service, system backup and file transfer with notebook/tablet product lines. Traditional Internet enterprises have followed iCloud’s suit. Google Docs launched years ago is the prototype of mobile cloud service. As the Android operating system gains growing popularity, a host of services including online storage, music and films are moving onto the mobile platforms. In China, cooperation between Alibaba and K-Touch also started with mobile e-commerce, leveraging the strengths of traditional Internet enterprises through the integration of the cloud operating system and e-commerce.

Smart phone will become an important tool for mobile terminal vendors to expand cloud service.

As smart phone experienced a rapid growth in 2011, mobile terminal vendors also made efforts to popularize smart phones sold around RMB1,000. According to CCID Consulting forecasts, sales volume of smart phones will hit 43,569,000 in China in 2011, up 36.1% from 2010. In addition to meeting the users’ demand for smart phones, mobile cloud service can also break the bottleneck of mobile terminals. Therefore, with the widespread application of smart mobile terminals and the increasing demand for the carrying capacity of the mobile terminals, it is imperative to integrate smart phones with mobile cloud computing, which will expedite the implementation of mobile cloud service.

Industrial application will become an important trend of cloud service for telecom operators.

Industrial application of telecom operators has always been the main task of informatization construction in China, and mobile cloud computing will bring new vitality into it. Industrial cloud like financial cloud and intelligent transport cloud are being applied. For example, China Mobile’s “Big Cloud” platform is not merely intended to meet its own demand for high-performance computing; more importantly, the operator wants to figure out how to utilize relevant technologies to establish Internet service platforms, thereby providing commercial-use mobile cloud services for the public. Industrial application has become an important trend of cloud services among telecom operators, and will see further development.

To sum up, along with the development of mobile cloud service, it is difficult for terminal vendors, telecom operators and traditional Internet enterprises to meet the users’ increasingly diversified demand for mobile cloud service by merely relying their own business lines. The industry chain of mobile cloud service will also keep expanding in a mesh-like manner. Finally, lying in the core of competition in the business model of mobile Internet will be competition among different types of industry ecosystems, which will give rise to new business models and business innovations for mobile cloud service in China, thereby driving the overall development of China’s mobile cloud service.