[TechCrunch Beijing] Chinese Cloud Services Taking on New Role as Incubators

Guo Peng, vice president of UCloud, Dominique Tu, VP at Kii, and Lv Guihua, president at Qiniu, took stage today at TechCrunch Beijing with TechCrunch China co-editor Shuhang Lee to discuss the red-hot cloud service industry.

As old friends of ours, the three panelists have joined us last year at TechCrunch Shanghai to talk about the sector. When being asked to comment on what’s new in the field in terms of expansion and progress of new businesses, Dominique said that one of the most significant characteristics of cloud industry is to remain focused and provide steady services rather than changing businesses every day. “Although we hold a lot of marketing activities, we still take cloud data storage as our primary priority and try to build infrastructures that can solve problems for our clients. The new products we released are all closely related to this focus.”

There’s no significant change in product forms, however, the continuous education of users is bringing more opportunities to the market, said Lv Guihua. Dominique echoed his opinion. He added that more big clients and hardware entrepreneurs use Kii’s services for data processing and user system management so as to focus squarely on design and manufacturing of their products.

It is interesting to notice that Chinese cloud services are taking on a new role as incubators for startups that use their services. All the three companies are in discussion with hardware manufacturers, big or small, but they refused to disclose name of their partners at present.

UCloud has established an incubator program in Shanghai, helping startups to get funds, said Guo Peng. With venture capital as one of its three pillar businesses, Kii teamed up with HWTrek, a Taiwan-based smart hardware platform offering services from product design to funding/crowdfunding. Qiniu is cooperating with VCs, especially early-stage VCs, by sharing and introducing clients to each other.

Lv said it is very easy for cloud storage services to cooperate with hardware makers, since most hardware are wearables dedicated to data collection. He added four categories of hardware products are closely related to cloud services, namely, set-top-boxes, cameras, smart wristbands and smart watches.