Finding their silver lining in the ‘cloud’

Beijing Cloud Valley boasts of having China’s first-generation cloud tech applications and hardware, reports Ed Zhang

Clouds are quiet. So are the ones — called cloud computing — that are changing the landscape of technology and business.

In the relatively quiet and spacious Beijing Development Area (known in short as BDA) in the city’s southeastern suburbs, hundreds of young engineers and programmers have quietly gathered, developing China’s first-generation cloud tech applications and hardware. Where they work is called Beijing Cloud Valley.

For the past couple of years, the municipal government has been working closely with private investors and entrepreneurs in building up the city’s future- oriented technology industries, cloud tech being a top priority, said Qin Jie, an investment officer in the Cloud Valley management team.

One of the unique advantages that Beijing has is its army of IT professionals and its large number of colleges that keep generating more engineers and software programmers every year.

No other city is more suitable than Beijing to champion cloud computing in China because, on a daily basis, the city is able to share it, as much as it also needs to share huge resources.

Cloud tech will be indispensable for any meaningful attempt to raise the quality of the governance of public services, Qin pointed out.

In a time of unprecedented urbanization, not just in China but also throughout the developing world, one of the most efficient ways to guarantee a basic level of fairness and citizens’ satisfaction with the government is to implement cloud tech solutions in all areas of public administration.

Luckily, China is large enough, complex enough and also has enough IT engineers to be one of the world’s frontrunners to develop this sort of large-scale governance-enhancing solutions, Qin noted.

“It is unlike the first Internet wave, in which China lagged 20 years behind the developed economies, the US in particular, because the country was still in the early stages of its opening up, and not many people could afford a personal computer,” said Qin.

“This time, in the cloud tech wave, we can run neckand-neck with the developed economies, not just to compete but also work and contribute to each other as equal partners,” he said.

Cloud computing will be used in every industry in which daily work requires the processing of a huge amount of information, or big data, from banking to telecommunications, and from government to the management of all subsystems of the social security network.

With a new generation of platforms and frameworks, “we can support thousands of users operating at the same time, to bring them relevant data from everywhere, on which they can operate and develop their own solutions”, Qin explained.

“Doing so can be extremely economical, extremely intelligent and help work out extremely complex issues, in ways that people never thought of in the past.”

For exactly that reason, Qin pointed out, any successful models of implementation in China, a country with some of the largest cities and the most complex management problems in the world, would inevitably attract attention from other solution providers involving similar cases in other countries.

A Cloud Valley company manages people’s medical records and helps them book visits to their doctors on mobile handsets.

The city of Beijing claims to boast a half-million young professionals staffing its software and related services. Based on that potential, it has a plan to build a cloud tech industry capable of generating 200 billion yuan ($33 billion) in revenue by 2015, said Vice-Mayor Gou Zhongwen at a meeting in December 2011 in Cloud Valley.

The cloud is where people build dreams. It certainly is for Tian Suning ( Edward Tian), chairman and founding partner of CBC, the leading investor in Cloud Valley. The 50-year-old Tian was one of the earliest entrepreneurs in China’s Internet age. He has been busy creating new companies and new business models over the past 20 years after he earned his PhD in the United States.

The first company that Tian and his friends created, back in 1993 in the US, is now part of the Nasdaq-listed AsiaInfo- Linkage Inc, a specialist in IT solutions and services.

In 2006, the second company that Tian and his friends built, a telecommunication service provider, was listed in Hong Kong. The company was merged into China Unicom in 2008.

After raising funds for his company CBC and founding Beijing Cloud Valley in 2011, Tian and his team began working with the Shanghai municipal government in developing a Shanghai Cloud Valley.

The purpose is to copy their way of working with the local government in Beijing, or the “( private investment) funds plus base ( provided by local government plus industrial cluster” model. That means the government needs to provide offices to the cloud tech companies that are chosen by the venture capital funds (say funds under CBC)

The Shanghai Cloud Valley is in the city’s Yangpu district, an area where many of the city’s many universities are based, Qin said. It has 15 participating companies.

In 2013, Tian’s CBC said it owned three funds, two of them worth $700 million and the third 1.5 billion yuan. They are devoted primarily to companies involved in big data and cloud computing at a time when there were already 22 member companies in Beijing’s Cloud Valley, all supported by CBC investment.

Tian apparently wants to make Cloud Valley a brand name. His company ( his investment fund) joined other organizations to sponsor an annual Cloud Valley World conference/exhibition for tech companies to learn from each other and for spreading knowledge and inspiration about cloud tech.

The 2013 Cloud Valley World conference was held last week in Beijing. It split its activities between the north and south cloud bases in Beijing.

Young computer engineers from all major technology parks in the country are attracted to the annual Cloud Valley meetings, where one often hears them quote a saying from from Tian, whom they nicknamed China’s Mr Cloud, that goes: “Our worst enemy is our lack of imagination.” Contact the writer at edzhang@ chinadaily.com.cn