Tencent Cloud has come a long way since its official public in 2013. Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group Senior Executive Vice President and CEO Dowson Tong shares his thoughts about the company’s cloud-computing journey and what businesses need to do to stay competitive amid accelerated digitalization.
By Dowson Tong
With the convergence of the digital and physical worlds, businesses need to leverage technology to stay competitive in the global marketplace and meet the needs of today’s much more demanding mobile-native generation. We established the Tencent Cloud and Smart Industries Group (CSIG) in 2018 to provide innovative solutions for industries that are ripe for business transformation using digital technologies.
We’re fortunate that many global enterprises have chosen Tencent as a long-term strategic partner. Their overriding goal is to embrace the always-connected lifestyle and capture the next opportunities created by advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation with the explosive growth of all kinds of data.
Tencent has the broadest portfolio of online services among Chinese Internet companies. We have the largest computing infrastructure in China with over a million servers, half of which we use for our own services such as Weixin and QQ, while the other half is used by our partners and enterprise customers.
Cloud Services Grow at Tencent
We started offering cloud services for partners on the QQ open platform in 2010. Three years later, we officially launched Tencent Cloud to the public. Tencent Cloud has since then helped many Chinese Internet companies such as Little Red Book and Bilibili manage their exponential growth by meeting their computing needs.
In 2016, we established global partner networks in Asia, Europe and America to bring Chinese enterprises to the world and help global companies enter the Chinese market. Two years later, with the formation of CSIG, we rolled out a strategic upgrade to embrace the newest evolution in digitization – the industrial internet.
Last year was a meaningful year for us in this journey. We opened six new data centers in Bangkok, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo, accelerating our global business expansion. We now have data centers in 26 geographic areas on five continents with 70 availability zones and an exabyte-level storage capacity. In addition, our content delivery network has deployed 2,800 acceleration nodes, covering 70+ countries and regions.