Policies Favor Manufacturing to the Cloud Industrial Intelligence Market in Focus

Cloud for manufacturing companies increasingly favored by policy

According to the Three-Year Action Plan for Cloud Computing Development (2017-2019) issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the scale of China's cloud computing industry is expected to reach 430 billion yuan this year, and enterprise cloud has become one of the focuses of the construction of the intelligent manufacturing field after robotics.

According to the China Academy of Information and Communication Research, from 2013 to 2016, the average annual growth in the number of enterprise users of China's industrial cloud platform was more than 146%, but the overall scale of China's enterprises in the cloud is relatively small. Consulting organization IDC statistics show that the scale of China's public cloud market is still less than 3% of the United States. The government departments have long given quantitative indicators for establishing an industrial Internet platform, promoting industrial enterprises to the cloud, developing industrial APPs, and building an ecosystem.

In November 2017, the State Council issued the "Guiding Opinions on Deepening "Internet + Advanced Manufacturing" and Developing Industrial Internet", which proposed that by 2025, 3~5 industrial internet platforms with international competitiveness will be formed, one million industrial APPs will be realized, and one million enterprises will be cultivated to go to the cloud. The Central Economic Work Conference at the end of 2018, on the other hand, proposed to increase the technological transformation and equipment renewal of the manufacturing industry, accelerate the pace of 5G commercialization, and strengthen the construction of new infrastructures such as artificial intelligence, industrial Internet, and Internet of Things.

At a time when the digital economy is surging, how manufacturing enterprises can properly go to the cloud according to their business needs has become a test question.

Three Ways for Manufacturing to Go to the Cloud

The so-called manufacturing industry on the cloud refers to cloud service providers to provide computing, storage, network, security, applications and other cloud services for enterprises, and build a data model library to link all aspects of the enterprise's personnel, sales and production to improve efficiency. The industrial cloud, on the other hand, belongs to the same infrastructure of intelligent manufacturing as the industrial Internet, industrial Internet platform and industrial APP.

After applying cloud computing to the manufacturing industry, the traditional manufacturing industry is bursting with new vigor and vitality with the support of new-generation information technology. From the production, transportation and sales of products and other aspects, cloud computing plays a crucial role in the development of the entire manufacturing process. Cloud will enable the manufacturing industry to continuously improve the production process, adjust the production structure, improve production efficiency and product quality.

So, how does the manufacturing industry go to the cloud? Insisting on independent innovation, focusing on productization of cloud computing company Shanghai cloud axis (ZStack) founder and CEO Zhang Xin responded to this, manufacturing enterprises on the cloud is roughly three ways:

First, the information transformation of large manufacturing groups, these groups have a lot of information companies, resulting in a lot of difficulty in operation and maintenance, by going to the cloud to do information technology transformation, you can optimize the original chimney architecture, and the experience will be replicated to the subordinate subsidiaries.

The second is to start from the business upgrading of manufacturing enterprises, through the production of new intelligent applications to help manufacturing enterprises to improve productivity and reduce factory accidents, which are mainly in the form of applications. And such applications are born on the cloud, closely related to artificial intelligence, big data, video, etc., so the landing process, you need to build a cloud platform to do application undertaking. This kind of customers for cloud perception is not very strong. From the current "manufacturing enterprises to the cloud" landing case, the above two categories are very common.

Thirdly, some manufacturing enterprises have strong IT capabilities, and these enterprises will move the development and testing production environment to the cloud to develop applications that meet business needs.

In Zhang Xin's opinion, manufacturing enterprises should not go to the cloud for the sake of the cloud, but should find out what is the purpose of the cloud? For example, is it to reduce costs, or improve yield? After establishing the purpose of the cloud, to consider what kind of cloud mode and what kind of cloud platform to choose? All these are the key issues to be considered in the process of cloud computing in the manufacturing industry.

Industry pain points create opportunities

According to the reporter's understanding, manufacturing enterprises in the development process, the need for urgent transformation to enhance the original state of change enterprises. The traditional IT system in the security protection used for a single hardware system protection mode, the current lack of centralized and unified security measures and disposal of various types of emergency plans capacity and experience. Limited scale, low business profits, limited funds for enterprise information technology construction. At present, most of the characteristics of enterprise management, limiting the application of information technology software in the enterprise, the level of China's software industry needs to be improved, unable to provide good value for money customizable information products.

These industry pain points are not terrible, as a business, Shanghai Cloud Axis Information Technology Co., Ltd (ZStack) product development director Ningbo introduced, with other partial general-purpose cloud platform hyper-convergence products are different, the product combined with the actual needs of the customer, cut into the edge of the scene, such as the group cloud scenarios, industrial application scenarios and so on.

In Ningbo's view, many manufacturing enterprises face complex cloud platform deployment, operation and maintenance complexity and other issues. In addition, many edge application scenarios, such as manufacturing and transportation, have a large number of devices dispersed in the factory floor and highway tunnels, which require high equipment stability.

According to reports, the company's cloud platform has been used in many manufacturing enterprises, such as Xugong Group, Changhong Group, Changfei Cable and so on. From these users, the company does see a lot of real user needs. For these users, the number of nodes needed for many scenarios is not large, and more specific applications for a certain scenario are carried, and the main demand is virtualization plus basic network capacity. As a result, the rich manufacturing industry landing practice, so that the product encountered a lot of application scenarios, relatively more experience. Zhang Xin especially emphasized that support for localization and independent innovation is a long-term demand in China's infrastructure sector.

Many provinces have also developed relevant action plans to promote manufacturing enterprises to the cloud. In Henan Province, for example, the Henan Industry and Information Technology Commission has issued the "Henan Province "Enterprises to the Cloud" Action Plan (2018-2020)", which mentions that "enterprises to the cloud In Henan, for example, the Henan Industry and Information Technology Commission issued the Henan "Enterprises in the Cloud" Action Plan (2018-2020), which mentioned that "enterprises in the cloud" will significantly increase the number and depth of application, promote 30,000 industrial enterprises in Henan to go to the cloud, drive 100,000 small and medium-sized enterprises to go to the cloud, and save more than 3 billion yuan of informationization construction costs per year.