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InfoQ Homepage News Baidu Cloud Technical Development Center Launched in Chengdu

Baidu Cloud Technical Development Center Launched in Chengdu

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On the 12th April, the Chengdu High-Tech Zone and Baidu Cloud signed an agreement of cooperation: the Chengdu Baidu Cloud Technical Development Center will officially be based in the Chengdu High-Tech Zone’s ‘Mobile Internet Venture Building’. The technical center will provide a range of services including free office space to outstanding developers based in China’s Western region, Baidu Cloud related services and policy based support for comprehensive incubation services. The technical center will be comprised of four teams. At the agreement signing ceremony Baidu Mobile Cloud Division General Manager Yue Guofeng and representatives from Chengdu’s High-Tech Zone set out their vision for this cooperative agreement and made progress in addressing issues in the areas of policy, technical support, Baidu Cloud services etc.

As the four teams discussed their thoughts regarding the cooperation agreement, all parties mentioned the “cost issue”, such as how can the development center contribute to bringing down the initial stages of development in terms of energy and capital costs. This is something that Baidu and Chengdu High-Tech Zone have both emphasized:

“The Center hopes to cooperate closely in order to provide developers with: infrastructure, market entry routes, and extra services such as human resources. At the same time, the combined efforts of Baidu Cloud’s technical support services will help the developers in reducing costs of iteration, as well as bringing down cost of producing and promoting products...This is a successful vision.”

According to Yue Guofeng, to date Baidu has provided 20 employees in technology and market support, in addition to utilizing the entire South Western Technical Center to provide developers with relevant support. Future Baidu Cloud investments will focus on specific Cloud infrastructure, ecological infrastructure etc. Yue Guofeng provided a specific introduction to Baidu’s ‘Cloud’ investment status:

“Baidu has invested a lot in Cloud. Our largest single investment was in establishing a Cloud Computing Data Centre based in Yangquan in Shanxi, 4.7 billion RMB, this was a largest single investment. And this does not include the investment we have made in terms of providing infrastructure…we also invested a large amount in servers to expand our storage capacity, including last year in Nanjing China’s first ARM Server came on line in order to support the needs of large scale cloud storage.”

After discussing the Cloud, Yue Guofeng also revealed the following about Baidu’s mobile internet:

“Over the past three years, I have paid great attention to the development of mobile internet. From the wide scale emergence of smart phones to today’s wide availability of a large number of mobile facilities, the great potential for the development of mobile internet is clearly evident. How does Baidu see this phenomenon? In the future there will be many, many opportunities in the field of mobile internet, and these opportunities will be wide is scope. But such a multifaceted and large volume of opportunities are not suited to such a large platform as Baidu, they belong to the huge amount of developers out there. The future internet mobile generation is the developer’s generation. Now, what role can Baidu play in this new wave of development? Baidu can use its many years of accumulated experience to help the developers grow quickly, and quickly achieve success. We hope to work with our developers and registered users to construct this kind of ecological system, to promote the healthy development of such an ecosystem. This is our intention at Baidu- provide our developers with all kinds of related support in order to allow them to achieve fast growth.”

He then went on to mention two services that Baidu are currently working on:

  1. App Searches: Baidu will improve application function based searches. This will l allow users to achieve more accurate matches not just according to applying the description of information, but also according to the aggregate grouping of the web page.
  2. Discovery of App content: Baidu will mine App content, make matches in accordance with the requirements of users, and distribute to the relevant developers.

Of course, whilst providing services to developers, it is impossible to avoid the question of how to coordinate the interests of the developers. Addressing this issue Yue Guofeng said:

“To be frank, currently we have not yet considered this stage, we are still at the stage of helping all those involved to get started. In the future if the developers all achieve growth, this is something that we at Baidu all hope to see. In the future, in order to promote further development we can offer follow up projects, this is an operational issue.”

Currently the services Baidu offers to developers include: application search engine (BAE), ‘Cloud Push’ and mobile testing centers. Whilst utilizing these services the developers need to establish customized codes, Baidu is also working on other user requests such as providing big data services and customized services.

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