Embrace delivery, storage and linkage for a 'post-cloud era'

Eddie Zhao, vice president of BaishanCloud, delivers a keynote speech on Nov 18, 2016 at the World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

A Chinese startup has established an integrated solution to help traditional industries fly above the clouds.

BaishanCloud (BSC), a domestic cloud management services provider, introduced a "cloud linkage service" at the third World Internet Conference, which wrapped up in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province.

The company said it was the first to unveil such a concept of its kind in the industry.

By leveraging its cloud delivery and cloud storage network, the company is aiming to provide a cloud management platform, which is able to operate data storage, integration, acceleration and analytics services to fulfill the needs of enterprise customers.

Eddie Zhao, vice president of BSC, told chinadaily.com.cn: "We're targeting a market in the post-cloud era, where the frontiers and application programming interfaces (APIs) of public cloud platforms, including Microsoft's Azure, Alibaba's Aliyun, Tencent's Qcloud and Amazon Web Services, need to be connected and integrated to fuel more cloud demand from traditional industries."

Founded in April 2015, the company completed three rounds of private equity financing by July.

"We're expecting a 70 percent compound annual growth rate in the next three years and to become profitable and have a positive cash flow by the end of 2016," Zhao said.

Zhao said the company has contracted over 200 customers by now. He noted that there is a rising demand for cloud services in the traditional sectors, such as the financing, manufacturing and trading industries, most of which are lacking experience in building cloud systems.

According to Zhao, the needs for cloud services by traditional enterprises are more complicated than that of many technology and internet companies because they lag behind in IT infrastructures and applications.

"Companies like BSC are familiar with the requirements and pain points of traditional enterprises, and we are able to support them in providing customized cloud services to ensure their data resource exchanges and interactions,", Zhao said.

According to Zhao, currently there are more than 100 employees working for the cloud start-up and over 60 percent of them are R&D staff.

"We've set up two domestic R&D centers based in Xiamen, East China's Fujian province and Guian, Southwest China's Guizhou province and our Seattle subsidiary is serving as an overseas innovation and operation center to attract local talent and be competitive in the industry," Zhao said.

The company received the top cloud industry award -- "Cloud China 2016" -- administered by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) at the Fourth China International Forum for Cloud Computing Technology and Applications.

The authorities established the award last year, expecting to advance cloud development in China and to recognize the outstanding organizations and individuals who have contributed to this development.