Xu Ziyang: Focus on Value Creation and Empower Industries Precisely

In the 5G era, empowering different industries to accelerate their digital and intelligent transformation has become the focus of society. Today, I'd like to share ZTE's view on how to achieve this.

Staying committed to scenario-based deployment and value creation, we promote cloud and network synergy and provide precise services to accelerate digital economy.

As 5G warms up and speeds up in 2020, a total of 81 commercial 5G networks have already been launched worldwide, with China accounting for 70% of global 5G connections. By 2025, there will be 8 billion IoT connections in China, 10 times that of 5G subscriptions.

From the perspective of global development, digital economy has become the trend of our times. Each investment in the communications industry can bring about more than five times that in other industries, fully displaying the multiplier effect of digital industries.

In digital industries, the electronic information manufacturing industry provides materials and equipment to support the development of the underlying communications industry. As the telecom infrastructure improves, many emerging technologies such as big data and AI are applied, thus facilitating technology innovation. Such innovation then accelerates the development of the Internet industry, whose CAGR of 22.6% has been driven by the CAGR of 3% in the underlying communications industry between 2014 and 2018.

In addition to pursuing better development, digital industries will fully empower traditional industries to accelerate their digitalization. By doing so, we will embrace more flexible production relations, higher productivity, and more efficient production processes.

However, we are facing a lot of uncertainties.

As technology iteration accelerates in the global industrial competition, it is harder for excellent enterprises to sustain their leading positions, and more likely for latecomers to outpace early starters. With the coexistence of opportunities and challenges, the only thing certain is uncertainty.

In the process of industrial digitalization, new business models are likely to emerge or replace old ones across industries. Against this backdrop, the only thing certain is uncertainty.

How do we survive and stand out among such uncertainties? The key is to closely integrate our services with specific scenarios, tailor our products to customers' needs, and focus on value creation to continuously speed up iteration. We now have cloud technology, a powerful tool for handling various uncertainties.

However, enterprises have increasingly complicated requirements for cloud services.

To rise to the uncertainties, we need to focus on value creation and provide scenario-based services that can precisely meet customers' needs. To this end, the key is to identify and address the pain points of industry customers, and accelerate technology iteration accordingly.

For industry customers, the pain points include fragmented scenarios, heterogeneous collaboration, lower TCO, and higher security. Those concerns are still not properly addressed by the existing public cloud services.

As public cloud services are charged on demand, they are more cost-effective, as manifested by their low startup cost, small initial investment, and quick results, especially in terms of batch access to small and micro and start-up enterprises. However, when it comes to some large and medium-sized enterprises and small enterprises that have entered the high-speed growth phase, the pain points of public cloud services will soon come to light, as their focus changes from cost efficiency to customization and high security, availability, and controllability. With these pain points, such as end-to-end SLA and the low flexibility and customization of full-stack cloud, public cloud services may fail to meet the customers' needs, and PaaS may lack flexibility or individuation.

In fact, to attract industry customers, operators need to focus more precisely on application scenarios required by customers, so as to unveil their true pain points, solve problems by differentiated solutions, and create value through precise services to achieve a win-win situation.

As there are more exploratory activities involved in differentiated and customized services, it is better for operators to adopt agile and innovative services allowing lightweight and low-cost startup. Instead of seeking a perfect solution at the very beginning, operators need to make rapid iteration and agile innovations to precisely meet the requirements of high-value customers. In this way, we will benefit customers with higher cost efficiency.

To focus on value creation and empower industries precisely, we propose the precision cloud-network integration solution, in which clouds on demand and network and cloud synergy can be realized through the distributed precision cloud and deterministic precision network, and comprehensive support can be provided through easy maintenance, global coordination, and end-to-end security. Next, I'd like to elaborate on it.

The distributed precision cloud features a JAVA-like compatible TECS Cloud Suite, which enables full-scenario cloud, and supports AI, distributed databases, and dual-core engines.

Enterprise applications can run on embedded and stand-alone MEC and on both private and public clouds. By configuring the required computing power and throughput, operators and vertical industries are able to deploy their systems on demand rapidly.

The hyper-converged cores of TECS Cloud Suite enable the integration of key technologies in typical scenarios, and the building of a cloud-native technology stack for reusing and decoupling. TECS Cloud Suite supports coordination of software and hardware, and integrates "edge, network, and cloud" for the best performance.

Specific scenarios can be defined through on-demand menu to meet differentiated requirements and achieve highest efficiency.

The distributed precision cloud features low startup cost.

First, distributed precision cloud can be deployed with ultra-lightweight startup, and only boards are required for the deployment of the most basic embedded edge. Lightweight pool edge can start from 2 nodes, thereby allowing innovation and low startup cost.

Second, distributed precision cloud enables innovation at one node and replication throughout the network, and supports cloud agnostic migration and scale-in/out.

Operators have deployed cloud services. Now I would like to talk about the evolution path of precision cloud.

Specifically, we need to make some changes in the public cloud.

First, addition on the IaaS layer. We need to enhance network components by adding the service awareness, traffic offloading, and access mode selection features, and enable hardware acceleration and CDN cloud-network synergy.

Second, deduction on the PaaS layer. We aim to provide simplified, agile, and basic versions of PaaS service packages to achieve different capability configurations, so that enterprise customers can use highly customized services. Less is more. Too many functions could cause too many compromises and restrictions.

We should also deeply understand that the most valuable and differentiated resources of operators are their networks. So we should give full play to the advantages of the operators' networks to achieve the network and cloud synergy to precisely allocate network services to different customers.

Only in this way can we achieve the best performance of each bit in the network. The operator's network is like fertile soil. Some short-term business is like a fast-growing tree–it grows fast but consumes so much water and fertilizer that the soil may lose fertility in just a few years. The loss far outweighs the gain.

That is why we aim to provide services for different enterprises through precise cloud and network synergy to build a harmonious ecosystem, where sustainability of the operators' network business can be achieved.

In addition to the distributed precision cloud and deterministic precision network, global coordination, easy maintenance, and intrinsic security are also critical to industry customers.

Through cloud and network synergy, cloud and edge synergy, and edge and edge synergy, global coordination enables us to dynamically adjust and allocate resources on demand, and achieve cloud agnostic migration and scale-in/out.

Through unified management of resources and services, easy maintenance allows IT personnel to customize and manage the cloud with one click. They can handle complex changes as easily as they do on a private cloud.

In terms of security, we use software, hardware, and dedicated systems to construct active defense and personalized security networks. By introducing the zero trust architecture, we strive to provide enterprises with ultimate network security, data security, and user safety. We also tailor end-to-end security solutions for different industry customers.

ZTE has upgraded and rebuilt its production system based on precision cloud to improve production efficiency, discover business opportunities, and offer timely services for customers.
With such components as private cloud, public cloud, business middle platform, data middle platform, AI middle platform, and orchestration center, we have built an agile combat module for the front line.

With iCenter, an enterprise digital system, we can achieve mobile office and paperless office, and work from everywhere, even in customers' offices.

We have brought our business online. Now we aim to use AI technologies for smart online operation to tackle the uncertainties brought by future business.

In industry-level practices, we have built and customized precision cloud networks together with our partners to improve production efficiency through digitalization.

In the education industry, we work with New Oriental to provide education resources beyond the limits of time and space with an aim to channel the teaching resources to every corner of the country.

In the media and communication industry, we join hands with Xinhua News Agency to realize face-to-face communication through holographic display, and set the stage for everyone.

We work with SANY to build all-digital construction sites, aiming to guarantee unceasing machine operation.

We work with Jiangxi province to implement water management and inspection, aiming for a better environment.

We work with Neusoft Medical as we believe that time is life.

We work with Suning to support its shops in better understanding customers' needs.

We work with SUPCON to ensure more stable output of quality products.

With the rapid commercial use of 5G, the precision cloud networks are expected to connect enterprises together and boost business development.

ZTE is ready to work with China Mobile and other industrial partners for a shared future. Thank you!