Since the first quarter of this year, my country's economy has made a good start, and the pace of economic recovery has accelerated. All walks of life have been busy for a long time. The contribution of the tertiary industry to the economy has returned to normal levels. The growth rate of consumption has bottomed out and the economy is improving. .
Under the spring breeze of economic recovery, the State Council proposed: Digital empowerment of small and medium-sized enterprises, help small and medium-sized enterprises to transform digitally, improve anti-risk capabilities, enhance market competitiveness, and achieve new growth in benefits.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are the main body of our country's market and a vital part of the stable development of the national economy. As one of the key points of government work this year, the state advocates accelerating the digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises, supporting and guiding small and medium-sized enterprises to become high-end, intelligent, and green. "Digital-real fusion" is imperative.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, digitalization is also the only way to go. However, due to problems such as lack of IT infrastructure capabilities and lack of funds, many small and medium-sized enterprises face many obstacles and difficulties in the process of digitalization, and even have a negative attitude. .
Fortunately, technical difficulties can be handed over to others—now, more and more small and medium-sized enterprises choose to cooperate with cloud service providers to make full use of the resources provided by cloud service providers to meet the needs of business development.
How to solve the financial problem? On the issue of "how to obtain the most favorable cloud service plan", small and medium-sized enterprises are not the only ones racking their brains.
Alibaba Cloud has also begun to "volume"?
Under the general trend of digital and real integration, many cloud vendors have begun to "roll up". Squeezed by the three major operator clouds and Huawei Cloud, Alibaba Cloud has recently launched a "price war". At the end of last month, Alibaba Cloud released news of the largest price cut in history.
Judging from the data on Alibaba Cloud's official website, the products for this price reduction involve seven categories of computing, storage, network, database, video cloud, CDN, and security, with a total of 10 products. The price reduction of this scale seems to have captured the pain point of the "cost" of cloud migration for small and medium-sized enterprises. What is the situation? let's see.
Let’s first look at the computing products that everyone cares about most. The first thing that catches the eye is Alibaba Cloud’s cloud host product——Yitian ARM instance. The price is cheap, so will the product be a good one?
On the one hand, the main cloud server architectures in the industry are generally divided into two types: ARM architecture and X86 architecture. However, the application scenarios of the ARM architecture in China are basically the localization scenarios of Xinchuang, mainly used by some large enterprises, especially central enterprises, state-owned enterprises, and special industries such as public security, finance, post and telecommunications, and communications. It is not very applicable to the digital needs of small and medium-sized enterprises, especially private enterprises.
Moreover, as far as the mainstream architecture is concerned, the X86 architecture scene is more versatile.
On the other hand, the mainstream of the ARM architecture is Kunpeng ARM, and Yitian ARM is self-developed by Ali, and it is not yet mature and has not yet formed a scale.
As for the preferential plan, this price reduction only adjusts the annual subscription discount, and the volume-based and monthly subscription fees remain unchanged. For small and medium-sized enterprises, such concessions are not very flexible.
For example, for some cloud rendering companies, most of their businesses are high-volume, real-time task requirements. They need to be turned on immediately and turned off when not in use. They are also limited by "limited liquidity, poor risk resistance, and greater initial capital investment concerns. Cautious” and other characteristics, so when purchasing products, they often tend to pay for the package (according to the volume), and can be refunded immediately, which is truly “elastic” and flexible.
There are also scientific research institutions, universities, or individual users, who are generally short-term phased projects or tasks. Considering the cost, they are more inclined to choose to use cloud servers in a short-term lease.
Not to mention the needs of e-commerce companies during flash sales, promotions and other activities. This kind of temporary and periodic demand for cloud server usage during peak hours, considering resource utilization and costs, also requires more and more services other than yearly subscriptions. Flexible billing methods such as pay-as-you-go and monthly subscription.
Let’s look at storage products again. What we launched is Ali’s object storage product—Deep Cold Archive.
Deep cold archiving is mainly for extremely cold data that needs to be stored for a long time. For example, business scenarios such as long-term accumulation and retention of raw data in the field of big data and artificial intelligence, long-term retention of media data, tape replacement, etc.; to be more specific, such as the low frequency of daily calls and long-term preservation of historical data of tax bureaus and public security departments data.
The unfreezing and retrieval time of deep cold archive is 12-48 hours, which is not suitable for enterprises with high read efficiency requirements. For users who need to use cold storage, most enterprises still hope to be able to retrieve data faster when they need to call Response speed, even "minute-level read response".
In daily office, there may be fewer application scenarios for such cold storage products. Online transaction processing, log files, business cache, etc. usually require fast and efficient access and processing of data.
For some C-end-oriented software companies, the transmission and call of user usage data is particularly important. For example, learning software such as reciting words generally needs to collect the user's memory and transmit it in real time, and adjust the feedback.
In addition, due to industry policies or security compliance constraints, some customers prefer to privatize and archive data instead of putting it on the public cloud. In addition, when it comes to choosing the cloud vendor level, when it comes to security considerations, these users also have concerns about Internet cloud vendors.
Finally, let’s take a look at Alibaba Cloud’s discounts for database products. Two of the three main products this time use Ali’s self-developed Yitian ARM architecture. Like the above cloud host products, it also belongs to the relatively "marginalized" specification.
Specifically, in terms of ApsaraDB for RDS MySQL version, among this type of database products, popular specifications suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises include active-standby general-purpose 4C8G SSD cloud disk, active-standby exclusive 4C8G SSD cloud disk, active-standby general-purpose 4C8G local SSD disks, 4C8G local SSD disks exclusive to the master and backup, etc., are not reflected in this price reduction.
The product with the highest decline this time, the database autonomous service DAS, currently only supports two cities, Beijing and Shanghai, and the benefit area is still relatively narrow, which remains to be seen.
From a rough point of view, although Alibaba Cloud’s price reduction is “huge”, it is still doubtful whether it can really benefit small and medium-sized enterprises.
For small and medium-sized enterprises with many difficulties, the demand for "going to the cloud" should be seen
With the acceleration of the digitalization process, some new SMEs have fully embedded digital technology into their business by virtue of their flexible business models, extending it into the relevant ecosystem and benefiting from it, but most SMEs are still in the process. China is facing many obstacles, such as lack of resources and platforms, limited technological innovation, incompatibility of information, and insufficient ability to deal with risks.
For small and medium-sized enterprises facing the pressure of transformation and upgrading, the actual development needs of "going to the cloud" need to be seen.
For them, "Shanghai Cloud" needs safe, reliable, stable, and cost-effective products, detailed and feasible solutions, and perfect and convenient after-sales services. It is a cloud that truly fits the actual situation and needs of the enterprise and solves its pain points and difficulties. Serve.
In terms of price, only the discounts that can be enjoyed are the real benefits to small and medium-sized enterprises.
In the big wave of "going to the cloud", when major cloud vendors start a "price war", small and medium-sized enterprises will also benefit. In the process of "rolling", the major cloud vendors should also provide core solutions to solve the pain points and difficulties according to the development status of small and medium-sized enterprises, so as to truly help the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in my country and win reputation and market for themselves.