I always believe that no matter where you are, what position you are in or what job you do, if you don't have enough motivation, expectation and love in your heart, you can't have a strong sense of mission and responsibility, or you can't have a sense of happiness.
Recently, I read The Method of Happiness, and I was deeply moved by a passage in the book: "The busy type is the slave of the future, the hedonistic type is the slave of the present, and the nihilistic type is the slave of the past." We have all experienced the "golden rice bowl" brought by the golden decade of the communication industry, the "plateau platform period" copper rice bowl in the industry, and even the "paper rice bowl" of the whole society, all of which are "everyone is punished". Both enterprises and individuals feel great pressure and resistance.
As a result, some people choose "hedonism" life and muddle along in the unit day after day; Some people choose "nihilism" to live, immerse themselves in the glory of the past and live on the credit book; Some people choose a "busy" life, with endless meetings, reports and plans. Although they are busy all day, they do nothing. In this way, there are the "four kinds of people" written in my last article-those who want to walk and can walk finally choose to leave here, those who want to walk and can't walk complain about the system all day, those who don't want to walk and can't walk, and those who can and don't want to walk are left with painful struggles. ...
1. What are operators experiencing?
Borrow the classic prologue of A Tale of Two Cities: This is the best time and this is the worst time. For operators and other traditional enterprises that naturally rely on demographic dividends and scale dividends, the future may not be easy. No matter the criticism from the media, the cry of users or the resignation of employees, all kinds of signs show that the industry has already fallen from the "altar" where elephants run fast, becoming slow, slow and even a little embarrassed.
But it was never like this ten years ago. Not even thirty years ago.
"Great Leap: Thirty Years of China Telecom Industry" begins by saying: From economic bottleneck to social leader, from the end of the world to the number of users in the world, China telecom industry has achieved a great leap that attracts worldwide attention during the 30 years of reform and opening up! How did all this happen? This book vividly reproduces the glorious course of China's communication industry in the past 30 years of reform and opening up, and chooses 1978 and 2008 as two meaningful time points. The former is a crucial year for China to officially blow the clarion call of reform and opening up, and the latter is a crucial year for the golden decade of communication industry.
Between the lines, you can read what glory China's communication industry has experienced, and you can feel the sincere confidence and glory of practitioners. With the great changes of the times, the former giants have created more remarkable commercial achievements than before, but they have repeatedly lost in political status and industry image.
What do you think of when you talk about operators again today? Is it brilliant achievements in financial statements, or confusion and anxiety in the face of internal and external competition; Is it the pride and joy of building a 4G and 4G network, or the frustration and sadness of pipeline, low value and marginalization? Are you confident and proud of how much you can accomplish under KPI, or can't think of the constant tide of resignation at the grassroots level?
Is the operator really doing something wrong? Probably not.
Look at this era! This is an era of constant competition with peers, but there is no choice to be copied by OTT; An era full of opportunities, but full of crises; An era in which traditional large institutions have fallen from power and influence and individuals' free connection has risen in an all-round way. ...
This is an unchangeable and unbreakable era. In this era, competitors have changed, the rules of the game have changed, and the habits of users have also changed. Everything that was once used to it suddenly changed dramatically. Traditional services such as voice and SMS are accelerating the decline. Although traffic has become a new growth point, it has to face tremendous pressure of "speeding up and reducing fees". It can be said that in this era, operators are like trapped behemoths, struggling but full of powerlessness, wanting to change but afraid of uncertainty, trying to break through but unable to find a breakthrough. ...
The only way is probably three words left: throwing caution to the wind.
Second, what should operators do?
For the current operators, there are only two ways out, either to intensively cultivate existing customers and tap greater value points; Either open up new markets and find industry breakthroughs. There are too many articles about intensive stock trading, so I won't go into details here. I want to focus on new markets.
1. Where is the new market?
Recently, kevin kelly, the godfather of the Internet and the prophet of technology business, spent three hours at Stanford University to share his views on the general trend of technology business in the next 20 years. I'm interested in one of them. He said that no matter what industry you are in now, your business is data business.
Data!
Both the booming mobile Internet and people who have changed the world are getting information through operators' networks.
20/kloc-at a big data industry promotion conference held in Beijing in March/April, Ma Yun, founder of Alibaba Group, expressed his views in his keynote speech-"Human beings are moving from IT era to DT era. The IT era is dominated by self-control and self-management, while the DT era is a technology that serves the public and stimulates productivity. "
As we all know, in this year's Double 1 1 Global Carnival, Alibaba Tmall broke the transaction volume of 5.71billion yuan set last year in less than 12 hours, and finally locked the record at 91200 million yuan, of which wireless transactions accounted for 7/kloc.
What is behind the huge transaction volume? Is it Ali's increasingly powerful supply and logistics system? Or the overall decline of traditional retail industry? Actually, it's not. I think this reflects Alibaba's powerful data analysis and mining capabilities. In such a shopping festival, the most important question is how many goods should merchants prepare? In this way, the demand for goods can be predicted through the historical sales of big data on the platform, which can provide inventory basis for merchants and improve inventory efficiency and effect.
In the era of department stores, shopping data can only be counted manually, which is not necessarily accurate, but Alibaba will leave everyone's historical shopping and browsing data on the cloud. Therefore, Taobao is not only an e-commerce platform, but also a big data platform for customers.
Tu Zipei, vice president of Alibaba Group, cited a more understandable case when talking about this concept: Please predict which parts of the country will have two more children? According to the traditional statistical method, the estimate can only be reported by the census and the statistical departments of cities, districts and counties, which will not only be biased, but also lag behind. In Alibaba, it is not only true but also more convenient to count the areas where the sales of pregnant and baby products have surged.
The same is true for operators. Do you think operators are only providers of communication channels? Actually, it may be an information adaptation service provider. The files, folders and desktops we used before were all local. I still remember that the best backup tool at that time was probably a mobile hard disk or a Blu-ray disc. After entering the network era, data appears on web pages and links. Now there are labels, traffic, news and all kinds of information we need on the cloud. Cloud and data are the key words of this era. You know, this information is transmitted through the operator's network, just like the commodity information sold on Taobao. In addition to the information itself, its sender and receiver may be our focus.
Therefore, actively pushing the correct information to those in need is the big data service that operators can provide.
2. How big is the new market?
Wu Jichuan, chairman of China Cloud Computing Technology and Industry Alliance, once pointed out that big data is the foundation of cloud computing services and the most basic element of building a cloud platform. Without analyzing the big data of massive information, it is impossible to obtain valuable information from all information consumers.
Therefore, in the business world, big data has begun to become the business of many enterprises. The 20 15 white paper on China's big data transactions shows that by 2020, the market size of China's big data industry will exceed last year's 10 times, from 76.7 billion yuan in 20 14 to 8228 1 0 billion yuan.
On August 19, 2065438, the the State Council executive meeting passed the Action Plan on Promoting the Development of Big Data, which may mean that big data will gradually enter the era of top-level design in China, which will undoubtedly accelerate the further development of the engine of economic development.
From the perspective of operators? Take China Mobile as an example. We have more than 820 million users,1100000 4G base stations, and there are more than 10B data in the business analysis system. Our 10086 is dialed by many users every minute. In fact, all these actions produce a lot of data every day. So, how big are these data, and what effect will it have after concentration?
It has been estimated that a provincial company needs hundreds of pages of data a day, and these data will be transmitted to the big data center of China Mobile (Gui 'an), so it is necessary to rebuild a CMNET of China Mobile, which is the backbone network of cmnet.
Therefore, in a sense, operators have inexhaustible data-rich mines, and it is better to stand on the gold mine than not to dig at all. This is also the basis for me to judge that operators may "bottom out" in the era of big data.
3. What are the uncertainties?
Although the future is promising, it is a brand-new field after all. There must be new rules of the game in the new field, and there will also be corresponding rules adaptation process.
In the past few years, the concept of big data has caused numerous disputes and discussions in the industry, even appearing in Gartner's maturity curve of emerging technologies (also known as the hype cycle report of emerging technologies) for a long time. There is a simple reason. A new technology is often discussed as a concept. Although it has been exposed in the media for many times, there are few application cases.
Therefore, big data is increasingly regarded as the talk of critics, not the real industry.
The world's first big data exchange was established in Guiyang, providing global data trading services through electronic systems. It is planned that the transaction volume of data cleaning will reach 1 000 PB in 2020, with an annual total of 3 trillion. However, this highly anticipated institution has only brokered more than 3,000 transactions since its establishment. "There are not many companies and institutions willing to trade big data." The staff of the exchange said.
In addition, there are several key uncertainties affecting the development of the big data industry.
A. insufficient technical capacity. As a back-end support means, it is largely realized through outsourcing or procurement, so it has limited capabilities in self-owned software development, big data platform operation and maintenance, big data new technology application, big data analysis and mining.
B. data "walls" exist in large numbers. A large number of data are scattered in different systems, and after a long period of "vertical shaft" operation, an insurmountable barrier has been formed. Taking China Mobile as an example, the B domain is mainly business analysis data, the O domain is mainly network operation and maintenance data, and the M domain is mainly management information data. However, the IT systems in these three domains are under the responsibility of three different departments, which makes it difficult to integrate and form the data fusion effect of "1 1 > 2".
C. the organizational structure does not match. At present, few institutions will set up special departments to collect scattered data, let alone standardize the management and maintenance of these data.
D. the lag of thinking concept. If the disadvantages in technology, capital and talents can be made up by the efforts of the day after tomorrow, then the lack of consciousness will take a long time to cultivate.
In addition to the above points, the security of big data transactions, the rationality of pricing and the confidentiality of customer information all affect the scale and development space of big data services to a certain extent.
Third, the mentality and attitude of operators playing big data.
How should operators play with big data? I think we should answer three questions first: First, where is the data? Second, where is the data? Third, how to use the data?
1. Where is the data?
It is said that commercial times is experiencing a brand-new era of sharing economy. Consumers are abandoning traditional inefficient enterprises and turning to the embrace of shared enterprises in order to obtain the products and services they want. Uber makes cars better shared, Airbnb makes idle houses better shared, Bajie. Com makes creativity and design better shared ... Now, only the value data can be shared.
In the era of sharing economy, what is really shared is the effective relationship between supply and demand. Therefore, in the sharing economy, it is more important to create supply and demand scenarios and establish supply and demand links.
So is the data. With the explosive development of new generation information technologies such as mobile Internet, cloud computing and Internet of Things, ubiquitous devices such as smart phones, tablets, wearable devices and sensors are increasingly connected to carrier networks. All walks of life constantly and rapidly generate various interactive data and perceptual data. These huge, extensive, rapidly generated and updated big data contain unprecedented social and commercial value.
How to effectively mine and embody the value of data is an urgent problem. Stealing that the key is to establish a data usage scenario and build a data trading platform.
For example, the urban planning and design institute needs to evaluate the commercial value of the new district, and can provide regional population and economic analysis through the grid data analysis of operators; For another example, medical institutions need to reserve medicines and medical equipment for a period of time. Through the medical insurance reimbursement platform, they can count the medical diagnosis and medication in this area, predict the possible large-scale diseases in this area, and reserve relevant resources in time.
It is important to help data consumers find the data they need faster and more effectively, and facilitate the transaction between the two parties.
2. Where should I put the data?
Where such a large-scale data is stored is also one of the elements to test the big data industry. Please note that not all organizations have enough resources to build their own data centers. In this regard, the operator can only provide services.
There is a word in the communication industry called "carrier-level service", which means that communication services should have the characteristics of uninterrupted operation, large capacity, high stability and high reliability. To achieve these conditions, a complete set of QoS guarantee mechanism is needed, and one of the important links is the communication room with advanced facilities and standardized management.
So it can be said that in the data room, communication operators have inherent advantages.
Can this be used as an entry point for operators to enter the big data market? Openness and cooperation become the key words of this part. As mentioned earlier, there are many data and information islands in traditional institutions. To break the ever-building "data wall", we must first store, manage and operate them centrally. Therefore, the operator's high standard data center may be only a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The premise of "combining" data from different fields is to store these data in the operator's data center.
ICT infrastructure has the functions of connection and storage, and the data generated by it is stored through different terminals, which will be valuable when used in applications. Operators have both connection and storage functions.
Facing the future, the operator data center will become the center of the network, and building an agile, flexible and green business-oriented cloud IT infrastructure will make the operator data center the driving center of the new generation ICT infrastructure.
3. How to use the data?
What is the biggest challenge for operators now? Is the lack of end-to-end quality assurance leading to poor user experience? Is the impact of OTT business leading to the rapid decline of traditional business? Or is the scissors gap between business volume getting bigger and bigger and the investment pressure getting tighter and tighter? I personally don't think so. Our biggest challenge is that users are usually satisfied with the existing business. This will cause us to have serious path dependence, and will also form a "complacent" mood.
In fact, operators are now facing three major changes: first, from focusing on functions to focusing on end-user experience; The second is the change from providing voice and bandwidth to providing rich and open ICT integrated information services; The third is to change from the growth based on demographic dividend to the growth of application innovation. These three major changes have brought about changes in business model, operation model, research and development model and scientific and technological innovation, which will promote the digital operation of the telecommunications industry from closed to open.
In digital operation, at least three things should be done: first, take stock of data assets; The second is to build computing power; The third is the open data platform. According to Qiu Dawei, general manager of Guizhou Mobile, the development path of operators' big data is divided into three versions: 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.
Big Data 1.0 is mainly aimed at the internal analysis of operators, focusing on data integration and capacity building, laying the foundation for data value mining, and focusing on supporting precision marketing and precision network construction; Big Data 2.0 mainly aims at improving the value of data, with the focus on gradually expanding the ability to tap the value of internal and external data; Big Data 3.0 focuses on data realization, focuses on key customers and industries, builds a data ecosystem, and its external income is gradually prominent.
At present, operators have accumulated a large number of data assets in IT systems and network systems (of course, if they are not handled properly, they may become data heritage ...), and the communication network reconstructed by IT technologies such as SDN and NFV will form a brand-new flexible and intelligent network architecture. Network IT requires the establishment of network architecture with cloud data center as the core, and data center will become the core of ICT infrastructure. The layout and planning of data center will determine the future network architecture and future competitiveness.
With the development of the Internet for more than 20 years, the "interconnected generation" and "digital meta-people" who can grasp the future have grown up. Compared with the previous generation, their ways of communication, making friends, entertainment, consumption, work and study have undergone profound changes. Their dependence on the digital society and the Internet is innate and represents the new consumption behavior in the Internet era.
The new business operation system of operators is no longer a simple support system, let alone a simple online marketing interface, but a value creation system and an ecological chain system that connects operators, customers and partners, and connects networks, applications and contents. The traditional offline business hall will be greatly reduced or even disappeared. Instead, users can enjoy all kinds of services in real time on demand in the all-online mode, and operators can gain insight into customers through big data analysis, accurately market and provide smarter customer service.
From buying products to buying services, the rules of the game in the business world are undergoing fundamental changes, and the relationship between merchants and users has just begun from the moment of delivery.
Lawrence roberts, the father of the Internet, once said: "Since the birth of the Internet, we have only increased the speed of the network, but we have made no progress in improving network performance and other aspects." In this regard, operators are actively building a new business operation system from the perspective of consumer experience. The new system is no longer a simple branch system and network management system, let alone a simple online marketing, but a value creation system that connects operators, customers and partners, and connects networks, applications and content.
postscript
For operators, the golden decade of traditional communication has long passed, and the platinum decade of innovation and growth may just begin. Standing at the crossroads of the times, there is only one thought in my mind-"Maybe I didn't catch up with golden decade in the communication industry, but I will never miss the Platinum Decade in the era of big data again".