Meet 7 startups that could define the Chinese cloud
January 5, 2013
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
In China, “cloud computing” means something a lot different than it does in the United States. Because of cultural, regulatory and linguistic issues, private clouds are the hot topic while public cloud services (e.g., Amazon Web Services or any of the myriad SaaS startups in the United States) have little to no presence. This situation can make it tough for U.S. IT companies to make a strong cloud play in China, leaving the door open for Chinese startups to define the technologies that will sate Chinese companies’ immense appetite for cloud computing and shape the country’s nascent cloud ecosystem.
In December, I spent 11 days in Beijing, speaking at conferences and meeting lots of people. Across two whole days at different locations — coffee shop/co-working space Garage Cafe and startup investor/adviser/office provider Cloud Valley (see disclosure) — I met with about a dozen startups doing everything from social media marketing on Weibo to building solid-state drives. Here are seven of the cloud computing companies I met, all trying to do some progressive things. They don’t necessarily look like what you’d expect to come out of Silicon Valley, but their chances for success probably don’t depend on meeting American expectations…
EEPlat
EEPlat is fighting an uphill battle to bring Platform as a Service to China, so, Chief Marketing Officer Simon Liu told me, the company is taking a prudent approach. With the dearth of viable public clouds, there aren’t too many startups building next-generation web applications, meaning EEPlat’s most-likely customers are large businesses and independent software vendors that want to build their own applications. So, rather than trying to become the Heroku of China, for example, EEPlat is more focused on enabling applications like what you might see on Force.com…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/meet-7-startups-that-could-define-the-chinese-cloud/