Cloud Native Technology Is In The Ascendant. How Can German Alliance Invest In Early Investment?

With the rise of digitalization and intellectualization, cloud has become a trend in enterprises. In this new field, cloud primordial technology is becoming more and more popular.

"Cloud primordial can be regarded as an upgraded version of cloud computing. It combines and makes use of the advantages of the cloud. The current development is still in its early stage. The transformation of China's IT infrastructure is trillions of markets, where the cloud is native, and has the potential for rapid growth in the future. Recently, de Lian Capital Partners Xiao ran in an interview with the twenty-first Century economic report.

German Alliance capital was founded in 2011, focusing on investment opportunities in high-end manufacturing, cutting-edge technology, health care and other industries. In the forefront of science and technology, de link capital has taken cloud origin as one of the key directions in recent years, and has invested in two projects.

What is the investment logic of German Alliance capital in the cloud primary domain? How does it evaluate the value of early projects?

The rise of cloud native technology

It is understood that there are many versions of the cloud primordial interpretation in the market, of which the definition given by the Cloud Computing Foundation (CNCF) is widely recognized. It points out that cloud native technology facilitates organizations to build and run flexible and scalable applications in new dynamic environments such as public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. The technology of cloud primary representation includes container, service grid, micro service, immutable infrastructure and declarative API. These technologies can build a loosely coupled system with good fault tolerance, easy management and easy observation. Combined with reliable automation, cloud native technology enables engineers to make frequent and predictable major changes to the system easily.

"This can be understood in three ways." Xiao Ran said, first of all, the cloud native architecture features distributed and loosely coupled, which can be relatively easy to achieve flexible expansion and rapid deployment. Second, based on such an agile system, there will be new tools based on the new environment to make the cloud native architecture easier to build and manage. Third, it strives to achieve full standardization and realize the unification from public cloud to private cloud.

CNCF, the main cloud foundation, was founded in 2015. In the past five years, the cloud has been gradually developing, and is still relatively early stage. From 2015 to 2017, the cloud based native operating system had a technology stack controversy. Until 2018, Kubernetes gradually won the competition, which became the de facto standard for the scheduling of containers. Since then, both giants and start-ups have strengthened their capabilities based on the relatively determined technology stack, and Yun Yuan Sheng has entered a relatively fast cycle.

"This is similar to the original Android, NOKIA (Symbian), Microsoft (Windows Phone) have their own operating system, but Android later won the competition. Most companies are developing their own APP based on Android system, and the ecosystem is growing more quickly. " Xiao Ran said.

De link capital began to focus on cloud native in 2018 and regarded it as one of the key investment directions. Different from CNCF's cloud native Landscape, within the German Alliance capital, combined with the development and organization characteristics of the sub sectors, the cloud original track project is divided into four categories from the perspective of non technology stack.

First, the workload class includes the underlying cloud network, storage, container and container layout and management, database, etc. Two, the non workload category, including cloud native operation and maintenance, monitoring, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), is more biased towards the supporting environment and peripheral tools set; three, middleware attribute class items, such as message middleware, API gateway And so on; four is cloud native security related projects.

"We are very optimistic about these four kinds of projects, because for Yun Yuan Sheng, they are closely related. However, the maturity of each kind of project will be different in China, which will lead to different quantity and volume of enterprises in the track. Xiao Ran said.

At present, the workload category projects are more mature and the valuation of enterprises is relatively high. Non load type projects are secondary, middleware and security related projects are in a more early stage. For de alliance, which mainly invested in the early stage, the current focus is on non workload projects.

Three criteria for interrogation of project value

Recently, a project invested by the German Alliance capital for cloud primary operation and maintenance has entered the delivery period. This project belongs to the non workload category mentioned above.

Xiao Ran believes that the demand for cloud original operation and maintenance will increase in the future, and the industry has great potential. Unlike traditional architecture, in the face of rapidly changing infrastructure environment, the complexity of operation and maintenance will increase exponentially, and the demand for new operations and monitoring tools will become more rigid.

Before this, de Lian capital also invested in cloud management. Cloudy itself is an integrated product of managing different public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud environment. De alliance believes that for large and medium sized enterprises in China, the IT environment must be mixed for a long time. The cloud management platform has become an inevitable demand for complex IT environment management and rapid business innovation.

In such a mixed and heterogeneous environment, cloudy management has a long-term value, and it also has the possibility of extending the IT service platform to other products. Fei Yun is the head company in the track, and has been well tested in terms of product maturity and leading-edge, so de Union has invested in it.

Behind the launch of the two project, de Union has also refined a set of criteria for judging cloud primordial projects. Xiao Ran said the most important consideration is that the founders of the company need to have a deep insight into and thinking about technology and cloud primary ecology. Because cloud primordial is a relatively new direction, technology and ecology evolve very fast. The founders need a forward-looking perspective to have a good judgement of the future trend of the product.

"We saw a lot of projects but did not sell very much. The main reason is that some projects did not keep pace with the technological iteration and ecological evolution, or that the products they made were rather backward." Xiao Ran said.

Second, enterprises should not only compete on a single product, but also form product matrix and increase product thickness. When judging the potential of the latter, it depends on whether the individual product itself has the possibility of extensive extension. On the other hand, whether there is a relatively close combination of different products is also very important. Only in this way can synergy effect be formed.

Third, de Lian capital is also very concerned about the sales side, especially the feedback from benchmarking customers. Xiao Ran said that the customers of cloud original enterprises mainly aim at the two categories of large and medium sized enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, among which the proportion of customers in large and medium sized enterprises is more.

But medium and large customers usually have customized demands, which is related to the business environment of China's software market. "Cloud primordial enterprises need to have a delicate balance between standardization and customization in different industries and different customers, so as to enable the company to expand its business scale and speed." He said.

In addition to the German Alliance capital, the economic report twenty-first Century noted that Alibaba, Gao Rong capital, volcanic rock capital and so on, have also been laid out in the field of cloud primary.

"It is estimated that more institutions will participate in the future, but it will take a long time to understand and understand the industry. It is very important for entrepreneurs and investors to have a profound insight into the evolution of technology and ecology. Xiao ran added.