Ten years ago, the "stealing food" game gave Tencent people a "cloud service" thinking. With a "relentless force", the Tencent Cloud team started their TOB road.
Ten years later, when the founders of Tencent Cloud looked back on their journey in the past, their "relentlessness" remained unchanged.
01
Tencent's TOB Road to "Stealing Vegetables"
On September 30, 2018, Tencent announced a major organizational restructuring, adding the Cloud and Smart Industry Business Group (CSIG) and the Platform and Content Business Group (PCG), and began to fully advance to the industrial Internet. Among the two new business groups, CSIG has become the external window of Tencent's ToB strategy.
Regarding the fact that CSIG has become the external window of Tencent's ToB strategy, most people's interpretation is because of the cloud computing business. Because regardless of the future development trend or the business itself, cloud computing is the most popular field in recent years. This interpretation itself is not a problem, but Xi Ge believes that CSIG can become the external window of Tencent's ToB strategy not only because of cloud computing, but because the Tencent Cloud team's TOB capabilities are strong enough and experience is more abundant.
Ten years ago, the Tencent Cloud team started services in the TOB field.
In 2008, a company called "Five Minutes" produced a "Happy Farm" web game, and set off a nationwide upsurge of "stealing vegetables". This web game that brings a lot of fun to everyone has developed rapidly after it was launched on various platforms. The user scale soon exceeded 100 million and there were tens of millions of daily active players. With the increase in the number of users of "Happy Farm", the server of the game operator began to explode frequently, and was frantically complained by players.
The troublesome experience of "Happy Farm" ushered in a turning point in 2010.
At that time, the SNG Operations Department under Tencent’s Qzone business began to provide services for SNG Game developers on the Qzone open platform and introduced the popular "Happy Farm" to Qzone. The introduction of "Happy Farm" instantly detonated the gaming enthusiasm of massive QQ users. The influx of many users has caused the demand for storage resources of game parties to soar. It is reported that in order to support "Happy Farm" at that time, Tencent purchased and added thousands of servers in just one month, and made a lot of cutting-edge explorations in the technical architecture.
In 2010, because of the popularity of "Happy Farm", Tencent, which started to have a "cloud service" mindset, established a "Cloud Platform Department" composed of more than 10 people in the third quarter, and began to settle in the field as a team to solve some large traffic, High concurrency issues.
It is reported that by the end of 2010, Tencent’s “Cloud Platform Department” had served nearly 3,000 customers.
In 2013, Tencent Open Cloud officially changed its name to QCloud, and began to develop into the public cloud for more external customers beyond the open platform.
02
Tencent Cloud
In 2014, an eye-catching "subsidy war" took place in the field of online car-hailing.
In this fierce market competition, the IT infrastructure of a car-hailing company, one of Tencent Cloud’s customers, has encountered tremendous pressure. In crisis, its founder turned to Ma Huateng for help overnight. In order to solve the customer's problem, Tencent mobilized an "excellent force" to support it overnight.
After arriving at the customer, the Tencent technical team first added several key flexible downgrade switches to the taxi-hailing business logic together with the other technical team, and then rewritten the PushServer and LBS positioning systems with Tencent’s own framework and protocol to solve the problem. The issue of entering the upper limit. Later, the customer moved the entire system to Tencent's internal computer room.
After 7 days and 7 nights of hard work between the two parties, Tencent successfully helped customers overcome difficulties. After this battle, the Tencent team's technical capabilities and reputation in the field of cloud computing began to be recognized by everyone.
Subsequently, the Tencent Cloud team fully expanded into the financial, government, retail, and large corporate markets. In 2014, Tencent Cloud successively reached cooperation with Futu Securities and Taikang Insurance. In September 2014, Tencent Cloud won the WeBank software system.
In 2015, Tencent Cloud began to deploy the government cloud market, and successively launched different services including police cloud, government cloud, industrial cloud, tax cloud, and weather cloud. In 2016, Tencent Cloud won an order for Sichuan Provincial Government Cloud and completed the delivery within 60 days. In 2017, Tencent Cloud won an order for "Digital Guangdong" in Guangdong Province and delivered it on time, helping Guangdong's national provincial government to increase its online capabilities from ninth in 2016 to number one in 2018.
So far, Tencent Cloud has realized the comprehensive development of B-side and G-side businesses. At the same time, in the game and video fields where Tencent has traditional advantages, cloud computing services are advancing faster, and they have successively won service contracts for benchmarking platforms such as Douyu. By 2019, Tencent Cloud's global market share has surpassed IBM, ranking fifth among global cloud vendors, and has maintained the record for the fastest growth among major cloud computing vendors in the world for many years.
Looking back at the end of 2020, Tencent Cloud now serves the country's most mainstream e-commerce platforms, more than 70% of game companies, and has a penetration rate of more than 90% in the video industry. In addition, it is also one of the most important cloud service providers in fields such as government affairs, finance, and industry. The Tencent Cloud, which originated in "Happy Farm", has long been among the top cloud computing technology infrastructure platforms in the world.
03
Ten years of a sword, Tencent Cloud's changes and unchanged
From the establishment of the Cloud Platform Department in 2010, to the announcement of the establishment of an open platform in 2011, forming the prototype of Tencent Cloud, to the “930 Transformation” in 2018, the newly-built CSIG became the backbone of Tencent's full embrace of the industrial Internet, and to stand at the top of the world by 2020 Among cloud computing service providers, Tencent Cloud has gone through an extraordinary decade.
In the past ten years, Tencent Cloud's service capabilities have become stronger and stronger. It is understood that Tencent currently has more than 8,000 partners. Compared with last year, the business growth of partners has exceeded 100%. In terms of industry, it has provided more than 300 industry solutions for more than 20 industries. The market revenue created by Tencent Cloud and its ecological partners has reached tens of billions.
Increasingly powerful service capabilities have also made Tencent Cloud a new engine for Tencent's revenue growth. According to Tencent's 2020 Q3 financial report, the To B business with CSIG as its core, even under the pressure of the epidemic, has shown great resilience and growth potential. The company's overall revenue this quarter was 125.447 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 29%, and its net profit (Non-IFRS) was 32.303 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 32%, which was higher than market expectations. Among them, the single-quarter revenue of "financial technology and corporate services" including cloud business was 33.255 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 24%.
The powerful Tencent Cloud has become more socially responsible. In 2020, the sudden epidemic has put the world we live in into a dangerous situation. The epidemic has not only pushed our life world into a dangerous situation, but also caused great damage to our social economy. After the outbreak, Tencent took active actions, and Tencent Cloud responded quickly. It successively launched applications such as Tencent Conference, Health Code, and Resumption Code, and combined with Tencent's ecological services such as WeChat, Mini Programs, and Tencent Health to form powerful toB and toG. The product matrix helps companies and people fight the epidemic and resume work and production.
In this protest, the Tencent Cloud team once again demonstrated the "relentlessness" of daring to work hard.
It is understood that many people and teams of Tencent CSIG stayed up late to work overtime during the epidemic, and many teams are staying up late to work overtime. Together with their partners, they have supported the deployment of small programs for epidemic prevention and control in more than 100 cities across the country. Take Tencent's conference service team as an example. Affected by the epidemic, the demand for working from home has skyrocketed. In order to prevent the program from crashing, from January 29th to February 6th, the Tencent conference has been expanding resources every day. The average daily expansion of cloud hosts is close to 15,000. The total expansion of more than 100,000 cloud hosts in 8 days involves a total of The input of millions of nuclear computing resources has created a new history in the industry.
Ten years, Tencent Cloud's capabilities have been growing stronger, but its open heart and the "relentlessness" of the team's hard work have not changed.