By inviting a senior Microsoft R&D executive to be the leader, can JD Cloud, which is late to the game, catch up?

New Media Manager

Shin Won-kyung

On September 12, JD.com officially announced that its cloud computing business JD Cloud welcomed a heavyweight leader, Shen Yuanqing; this Microsoft veteran with more than 20 years of professional career and multiple important titles, was appointed president of JD Cloud Division.

From the perspective of Leifeng.com, this appointment seems to be a natural thing for JD Cloud and Shen Yuanqing.

According to JD Group CTO Zhang Chen:

JD Cloud Computing is late.

Compared with Internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent that launched public cloud services earlier, JD.com is indeed a latecomer in the field of public cloud services. Although JD.com established a cloud computing-related business department in 2012, and even began to serve as a window for JD.com's cloud computing technology output for a period of time later, it was not until April 1, 2016 that JD.com's public cloud services really began to take off.

The year 2016 was also defined by JD.com as the first year of JD Cloud.

It is worth mentioning that at the JD.com annual meeting in early 2016, JD.com Group CEO Liu Qiangdong proposed three important development directions for JD.com's future development: e-commerce, finance, and technology. The re-emergence of JD Cloud was interpreted by the outside world as JD.com's key move in the field of technology; and JD.com Vice President He Gang also defined JD Cloud as a "pioneer" in JD.com's technology field.

In terms of products, JD Cloud includes basic cloud and data cloud, and provides four major solutions, including e-commerce cloud, industry cloud, logistics cloud, and intelligent cloud. From the perspective of this product system, JD Cloud not only provides general technical cloud services such as elastic computing, network, and storage, which is the same as Amazon, Alibaba, Kingsoft and other companies; it also uses its own advantages in e-commerce and logistics industries to provide government departments, traditional enterprises and startups with industry cloud computing services with strong applicability, helping them complete the Internetization and realize the "Internet +" transformation.

JD Cloud has been making frequent moves since its relaunch. On the one hand, JD Cloud has reached cooperation agreements with Intel, Dell, 21Vianet and other companies to promote JD Cloud's technological progress and improvement, and even launched domain name services; on the other hand, JD Cloud has also cooperated with various local governments and enterprises to realize the "Internet +" ecosystem. In addition, JD Cloud has frequently appeared in a series of industry summits such as the China Internet Conference and the Global E-Commerce Conference, and held JD Cloud channel partner recruitment conferences in November 2016 and 2017.

It is worth mentioning that in JD.com's 618 event, JD Cloud no longer only plays the role of backend technical support, its host products also participate in JD.com's 618 promotion, providing various discounts for individual and corporate users. It can be said that in the past two years, JD Cloud has been making its presence felt inside and outside JD.com.

The importance that JD.com attaches to JD Cloud can be explained by a passage from Liu Qiangdong’s opening ceremony of JD.com in 2017:

The core of JD.com's development in the next twelve years is technology. JD.com plans to use technology to transform the traditional retail business model and become a retail infrastructure service provider. It will provide "retail as a service (RaaS)" solutions to the whole society. These solutions will also be combined with technological innovations such as big data and artificial intelligence to empower more partners through the JD Cloud platform.

This shows the importance of JD Cloud to the future development of JD.

Before Shen Yuanqing joined JD.com, the development of JD Cloud was once associated with He Gang's name.

He Gang joined JD.com in 2012. Prior to joining JD.com, He Gang had served as the head of Amazon's cloud computing project and Shanda's cloud computing. In April 2012, He Gang joined JD.com as vice president of technology and chief scientist, and began to gradually take charge of JD.com's cloud computing business.

In the five years since then, He Gang has appeared in media reports as the head of JD Cloud, whether it is the step-by-step upgrades, iterations and releases of JD Cloud or a series of external activities and publicity of JD Cloud. During this period, his titles included Vice President of JD Group, Head of JD Cloud's "Internet +" Strategy, General Manager of JD Cloud Computing, and even from October 2016 to January 2017, He Gang was directly given the title of "President of JD Cloud".

Since then, He Gang's name has not appeared in reports related to JD Cloud, and there has been no news about the president of JD Cloud. In the external cooperation related to JD Cloud, Deng Tianzhuo, the vice president of JD responsible for O2O business, has appeared.

It was not until September 12 that JD.com Group announced that Shen Yuanqing would serve as president of the JD Cloud Business Unit.

Before joining JD.com, Shen Yuanqing's titles included Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft Asia Pacific Research and Development Group, General Manager of Microsoft Asia Pacific Technology Co., Ltd., and General Manager of Microsoft Cloud Computing and Enterprise Division, etc. However, from a more understandable perspective, Shen Yuanqing is actually the third most important person in Microsoft Asia Pacific Research and Development Group after Hong Xiaowen and Wang Yongdong. Leifeng.com found that in fact, his resume is still listed on the "Management Team" page of Microsoft Asia Pacific Research and Development Group, ranking after Hong Xiaowen and Wang Yongdong.

Microsoft's official website's introduction to Shin Won-kyung

According to his resume, Shen Yuanqing joined Microsoft in 1994, and it has been 23 years since then. During this period, he has been engaged in and led various businesses including cloud computing, and has rich experience in operations, sales, partners, and ecosystem construction. This is a rare choice for JD Cloud, which needs both strong technical background and strong operational capabilities.

As Long Yu, Chief Human Resources Officer and General Counsel of JD.com Group said, as a heavyweight figure of Microsoft in China, the magnetic field effect created by Shin Won-kyung's joining can also attract more talents to JD.com; this will be beneficial to the development of JD Cloud and other related JD businesses.

In addition, as the president of JD Cloud Division, Shen Yuanqing reports directly to Liu Qiangdong, Chairman and CEO of JD Group, which also reflects that JD Cloud has been promoted to the status of a division in the entire JD Group. When Leifeng.com asked JD about this promotion, the other party responded:

As the fourth retail revolution is approaching, JD.com will transform into a retail infrastructure service provider, and drive more companies to optimize their cost and efficiency experience through opening up and empowering. JD Cloud, as a key platform for JD.com's external empowerment, has received more attention from the group. Mr. Shen Yuanqing joined JD.com as the president of JD Cloud Division and reported to Mr. Liu Qiangdong, which once again demonstrated JD.com's recognition of cloud computing business and its determination and confidence in its future development. In the future, under the leadership of Mr. Shen Yuanqing, JD.com will also invest more resources to focus on and concentrate on providing users with better cloud computing services.

However, from the perspective of the entire cloud computing market, there are international giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google abroad, and domestic companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Huawei are also staking out their claim in the cloud computing market. As a latecomer, JD.com has invested heavily in the cloud computing field in the past two years and has certain advantages, but it still has a long way to go compared to its competitors.

Shin Won-kyung’s joining can be regarded as the second step for JD Cloud to catch up in the field of cloud computing. If JD Cloud wants to truly catch up with its rivals, it still has a long way to go.