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Tencents not holding back on cloud. Source: Shutterstock

Amid the tidal shift to remote working and the need to develop apps and systems to help contain the outbreak going forward, the services of Chinas cloud giants have been indispensable in the last few months. Leaders Alibaba Cloud and Tencent have been charitable the former offered has its computational platforms and resources available to tens of research groups to accelerate data-heavy drug development and vaccine discovery but the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic have reaffirmed the need for cloud computing among customers, and proven hugely lucrative for those cloud leaders.

The circumstances have also opened up new opportunities. The benefits of the long-emerging telehealth sector have been thrown into the spotlight: Alibaba revealed that its AliHealth app, hosting over 1,000 doctors, has been receiving over 3,000 consultation requests per hour at the peak of the pandemic, while Chinese Tencents Wedoctor app had served up to 1.5 million consultation services by the end of February.

Eyes are on automation, too. COVID-19 has provided the watershed moment for investment into automation technology such as robotics to get serious in sectors like manufacturing and logistics. Cloud computing will be a backbone.

As reported by Reuters, this technological inflection point though ripe with cloud-driven opportunity is leading to more fierce competition than ever between Chinas tech titans, and contender Tencent is taking every opportunity to steal ground across Asia and beyond from world heavyweight Alibaba Cloud, which dominates its home market and currently ranks fourth worldwide in the public cloud tables, behind AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Tencent last month also announced the launch of a smart city project. The Shenzhen-based smart campus will leverage technologies including 5G connectivity, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in a bid to show whats possible with these initiatives, and will serve as a manifestation of the companys ambitions.

Sources told the site that Tencents began to display a new level of aggressiveness as far back as 2018, when it put cloud at the center of its growth plans, and that energy has only stepped up a gear since the pandemic hit. The competition with Alibaba is so fierce right now, the sales teams are fighting them for every deal, an unnamed member of Tencents cloud division was quoted.

Already this year, Tencent has appointed more than 3,000 employees to its cloud arm and, as demand soared in China for bandwidth early on in the pandemic, it added a 100,000 cloud servers in eight days to support the box-fresh Tencent Conference.

In May, the firm said it was gearing up to invest 500 billion yuan approximately US$70 billion in cloud computing, AI and cybersecurity over the next five years. That was a I raise you on Alibabas pledge to invest 200 billion yuan (US$28 billion) in its own infrastructure just a few weeks before.

Tencents stacks, or a portion of them, will be directed at growing its operations outside its home market. At present, Alibaba Cloud has an unchallenged lead, claiming just under half (44.5%) of the entire cloud market share, while Tencent holds about a fifth, the same as Huawei Technologies. The social media and gaming titan wants to take the fight to Alibaba and other US rivals in markets outside of China, in markets where the battle between these two cloud blocs continues.

The cloud infrastructure markets of India and Indonesia will be crucial turf for Tencents growth ambitions, and here it will be able to compete for market share against its own local rival Alibaba Cloud, and US firms Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS.

Speaking to Reuters, Poshu Yeung, VP of Tencents international business group, noted a huge interest in shifting further into the cloud business and for the online education market.

Although Tencent came to the space later than Alibaba, I believe the company is willing to endure a relatively long period of investment cycle for this business, hoping to catch up or one day becoming the No. 1 player in this field, said Alex Liu, tech analyst at China Renaissance commented.

Part of Tencents play to gain ground includes getting better at bespoke B2B sales and products, which is Alibaba Clouds bread and butter, while Tencent has been focused more on consumer-centric products and design.

Tencent has great genes in business-to-consumer, but in business-to-business, we either didnt have product managers or we just hired folks with a business-to-consumer background so it took a bit of time to convert their thinking, a second Tencent cloud source told the publication.

Tencent has gained ground in government contracts, a small but reputable sector which it can use to its advantage in attracting private-sector clients. Reuters noted that its determination to win tenders saw Tencent offer the Fujian province government a completed information project plan for 0.01 yuan in 2017.

Mark Jones

Mark is Editor at TechHQ.com (a part of the Hybrid group), a publication with the objective of putting the newest and most relevant of enterprise tech on the radar of SMEs from all industries.

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How Tencent is bringing the storm clouds to arch-rival Alibaba - Tech Wire Asia

In 2013, long before the world was discussing clean energy and sustainable practices, two IIT Madras graduates Swapnil Jain and Tarun Mehta had an idea to develop Indias first-ever electrical scooter. This was at a time when auto manufacturers were still focusing on fossil-fuel-driven vehicles and eco-friendly mobility solutions were more a trendy alternative catering to a niche market.

The duo founded Ather Energy in 2013 and launched their first fully-electric scooter, the Ather S340, in Bengaluru in 2016. Since then, the company has released several new models into the market and is planning to expand to eight more cities by the end of the year. To support the smooth running of their vehicles, Ather has set up a network of charging stations across every city they have launched in.

The setup of the charging infrastructure precedes the launch of the vehicle in a city by a couple of months. This means there are stations where you can charge your vehicle in about an hour, and not worry about them powering down. The target is that at no point should you be more than four kilometres away from a charging station, says Swapnil in conversation with YourStory.

Speaking about the infrastructure that allows Ather Energy to work seamlessly in a business that operates both online and offline, Swapnil says that they are actually playing on three infrastructures the manufacture of the vehicle, the installation of the charging stations with supply lines, and the data world.

Data was key right from the beginning for the team at Ather. Both Swapnil and Tarun knew that the next waves in the industry would be electric and connected. This meant that they were heavily reliant on data and connectivity to provide a better experience for the customers in the form of direct features, servicing, remote diagnostics, and a charging infrastructure solution.

The founding team at Ather Energy says that Google Cloud was their choice from day one to ensure that everything ran seamlessly. We never thought about doing infrastructure on-premise, says Swapnil.

The Cloud is at the backend, making all of this happen. In today's world, it does not make sense to actually set up your own infrastructure. We are already dabbling with so many different aspects of technology, and handling infrastructure just makes things more complicated. This gives us a lot more flexibility. You can quickly set up a server, or you can shut it down. We don't have to worry about buying any lead time, and things happen on the fly. We can focus on actually building the vehicle and the applications around it, he adds.

Swapnil says that the decision to adopt the Cloud from Day 1 cut down their development time by at least two years, and the investment needed for the talent to build infrastructure. We would have needed 25 engineers to build the infrastructure. This way, we were able to focus on creating value while cutting on costs, both of which are crucial for a startup.

The team went through two rounds of iteration. The first round of iterations was completely on our own. At that point, our team was too small to engage with the community. But in the second round, we engaged the Google team who started taking a lot of interest in what we were doing; they started extending a lot of technical support, and looking at how they could actually take the journey with us, says Swapnil.

The Google team started looking at the companys architecture and whether it was using the right solutions.

With heavy reliance on data to ensure that everything runs smoothly, managing the vast torrents of information generated every day is crucial. The team uses the data generated for improving customer experience and for diagnostics and servicing. For the former, it collects data such as riding patterns, geographical terrain, how the vehicle is being maintained, etc. to provide feedback. In terms of diagnostics, it looks for anomalies.

We have about 40-45 sensors on the vehicle itself, gathering data such as battery temperature, voltage, accelerometer, gyroscope, GPS, etc. We look at all this data and check for anomalies. This helps us offer a better customer experience from a features and reliability perspective, he says.

Swapnil says that the right technology partner is central to having things run efficiently. If digital technologies are not your primary area of expertise, you need a partner who is committed to making the journey with you and supporting you in the long-term. If you have good technical architecture, costs can be controlled. If your system design is bad, you end up incurring a lot more costs. So, enhanced technical support is quite crucial and critical.

Speaking about how the solutions were customised to Ather Energys unique requirements, he says that the process with a partner has to be iterative.

Working with the right technical partner has had a significant impact on Ather Energys growth.

While running costs are down by 60 percent, data queries take a mere five minutes to resolve (previously took a full day) and most importantly time-to-market came down by a staggering two years.

Going forward, Ather Energy plans to leverage the Cloud for scalability as they expand operations across the country; increase reliability; and data security, which has become crucial in the current scenario, with teams working remotely.

It's quite complex to do data security in a mechanical and electronic environment because the infrastructure does not really support it. So, we are exploring virtual desktops and how we can create a more secure network.

The outbreak has also resulted in a mind-shift in how the company works. As a manufacturing company, remote work was not a viable option. I think we have been able to break out of that sort of thought process. Because of COVID-19, we have been able to accelerate a lot of remote working. All our design work is continuing remotely and most of our people are still working from home. They're able to collaborate a lot more effectively than we thought possible. We have definitely fast-forwarded our digital transformation journey, he says.

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See the original post here:
How Ather Energy is leveraging the Cloud to build and scale smart mobility solutions for India - YourStory

The Chinese government and its state controlled banks have worked hard over the last decade to digitize financial reporting and procedures. These days, a business operating in China virtually never needs to visit a Chinese government agency office or a bank. Transactions and reporting are done online.

For normal daily operations, this means all of the following are done through the Internet:

If you try to do this kind of work through the old fashioned method of personal visits to the various Chinese government offices, you will be turned away.

All this appears to be modern and efficient. But this extensive use of the Internet conceals a hidden danger. In all these transactions, Chinese government agencies and the banks require the business make use of software provided by the agency or the bank. No independent software is allowed. This software is usually a package that includes connection software and anti-virus protection. In my experience, these packages are poorly written, buggy, slow and difficult to use. When installed on many businesses central computer, they slow operations to the point of being unusable.

But the real issue runs deeper. As I have discussed in earlier posts, the goal of the Chinese government is to make information networks in China closed to outsiders but completely open to the Chinese government. See Chinas New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide and Chinas New Cybersecurity System: There is NO Place to Hide. As I said in both of these posts,there is no place to hide. Once on the Internet, the information will be accessed by the Chinese government. To state the matter more clearly, the Chinese government has become the most active information hacker in China. So when a business installs the required software on its systems, this software is being provided by a hacker. The risks are obvious. In response to these two posts, many of suggested we not be so negative about this hacking because some of us still need to do business in China, but nobody has questioned our conclusion regarding the risks.

The reality of the risk has recently been exposed by Trustwave, a U.S. based cybersecurity consultant, in its report on a case where malware was included in software required by a Chinese bank for payment of taxes. See The Golden Tax Department and the Emergence of GoldenSpy Malware, subtitled, Trustwave SpiderLabs has discovered a new malware family, dubbed GoldenSpy, embedded in tax payment software a Chinese bank requires corporations to install to conduct business operations in China. The basic story is typical of China. The bank requires installation of its mandated software created by a private big data Chinese company working under contract with the Chinese national tax department. In other words, the mandate requiring the use of this spyware comes straight from Chinas national government in Beijing.

The software contains a backdoor that takes two actions. First, all data submitted to the bank and all other data on the host computer is transmitted to a server owned by a private Chinese company connected with Chinas national tax department. This server is housed on the AliBaba cloud. Second, the software allows the operator of the backdoor complete access to the entire host computer system. Trustwave provides standard advice on best practices for dealing with this type of infection. Their advice to remove the software is, however, simply not practical, since companies are required to use this spyware to do business in China. Their alternative is to install the software on a dedicated laptop that is fully insulated from the main company computer system. This approach prevents infection of the main company network system. However, it does not prevent the private data transmitted to the local tax authority from being transmitted to the malware server to be used for undisclosed purposes. It also is not clear how the Chinese government will treat a foreign company that isolates its exposed data to a sole, non-networked computer.

So now we know why all this Chinese government mandated software works so badly. The software is so filled with malware, backdoors and surveillance protocols that normal operation is slowed to the point of making many systems unusable. Those of us who work in China have always assumed this and now the Trustware report provides a concrete example.

The larger issue is that this forced installation of backdoor malware is a constant issue in China. It is not just the case of one piece of software from one bank. As this case shows, the national government works with government controlled banks, local governments, private software/big data companies and Chinese based cloud service providers to implement a system that allows total access to all information available on the networks located in China.

It might be possible to implement protections against one single piece of malware, as Trustware advises. But as a practical matter, it is impossible to implement protection against the constant and pervasive measures the Chinese government takes to access private company data. There are too many points of access. For example, government mandated inspection of company networks allows for installation of similar backdoor malware as part of the inspection process.

The issue is not simply the compromise of the China based system of foreign investors. Once the China system is compromised, the hacker (Chinese government) can almost always then gain access to the entire international network linked to the hacked system. The infection spreads from China around the world. Informatization, big data and full spectrum dominance is the Chinese governments highest priority. If you operate within Chinas borders, there is no place to hide. This has important implications for companies operating in China and this reality must be carefully assessed.

Read more:
The Chinese Government is Accessing YOUR Network Through the Backdoor and There Still is NO Place to Hide - China Law Blog