Please answer 2022 for the communication cloud market, Metaverse, IoT, overseas and scene-based

Standing at the starting point of 2022, and looking back at the difficult 2021, the Internet industry seems a bit unbearable. Except for a few bright spots, almost every track is quite difficult. Enterprise-level services are one of the few growth industries in 2021. Among them, communication cloud services have rapidly grown into a "super track" due to the epidemic. So where will the communication cloud market go in 2022?

2021, the communication cloud market will change from narrow to

Communication cloud services, simply put, are PaaS services that provide developers with underlying communication capabilities. They are mainly divided into two types of communication capabilities: IM and RTC. With the maturity of the market, in recent years, communication cloud manufacturers have gradually formed a front-end application scenario. The overall solution of "IM instant messaging + RTC real-time audio and video + X communication peripheral capabilities".

In 2020, the communication cloud service track ushered in an explosion, from narrow to wide. The "2021 Global Internet Communication Cloud Industry Research Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") released by iResearch shows that in 2020, driven by the "home economy" affected by the epidemic, retail customer service, e-commerce live broadcast, games and short videos, etc. The demand for communication cloud in the scene is rapidly increasing, and IM and RTC are gradually developing into entertainment scene. In addition, as enterprises accelerate their overseas expansion, the application of Internet communication cloud in transnational scenes will be further extended.

Specifically, the global communication cloud market size in 2020 has reached 4 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 62.6%. Among them, the demand for online live broadcast, short video, interactive live broadcast, and video conference has ushered in an outbreak under the epidemic. iResearch predicts in the "Report" that with the improvement of infrastructure and the development of technologies such as 5G and the Internet of Things, the global market size is expected to reach US$18.2 billion by 2024, and the market will still maintain a high growth rate of more than 40%. .

(iResearch's "Report" forecasts the market size of communication cloud)

Today, the growth rate of most technology industries has been reduced to 20% or even negative growth, and the market that can still maintain 40% annual growth in the next few years is obviously a "sweet pastry". Because of this, more and more players are actively involved in or overweight this market, and there is a lot of momentum.

In the past two years, professional communication cloud service providers have frequently circulated news in the capital market. Rongyun, a leader in the IM field, completed the D round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan. In the same year, Shengwang went public and completed the C round of financing. While professional communication cloud players are favored by capital, leading cloud computing giants such as Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud have also entered the market, either investing in professional communication cloud start-ups, or launching products in person. The communication cloud market is becoming increasingly competitive.

So, where will the communication cloud service market go in 2022? In the view of Luo Chao Channel, there are four key words in this market in 2022.

Four major road signs of the communication cloud market in

Signpost 1,

The biggest hot spot in 2021 is the "metaverse". The stock price of Roblox, the originator of the Metaverse, soared by helicopter. Facebook directly changed its name to "Meta" All In Metaverse. Many VR/AR companies have turned into Metaverse companies, and even Microsoft and Nvidia are also taking advantage of the "Metaverse" hot spot... …

The hot concept of the "metaverse" is controversial, but the emergence of this concept reflects the trend of the world's accelerated digitalization. In my opinion, the essence of the "metaverse" is a higher degree of integration between online and offline, and the closer integration of the Internet and the physical world. When the boundary between the bit world and the atomic world gradually disappears, the so-called "metaverse" is formed. It can be said that the metaverse The universe is an upgraded version of digitization.

Rongyun experts shared this view in the live broadcast, and I deeply agree: the surface of the metaverse is a stronger immersive experience, but its core is interconnection. Take off the "VR glasses" to see the true composition of the metaverse. Its essence consists of three elements: the big world, the big society, and the big ecology - the world is big enough, the scenes you can experience are rich enough, and there are enough social relationships to precipitate, Users can have more immersion in the gameplay itself.

Hot spot concepts are often temporary, but the trends they reflect are long-term. When the era of "Metaverse" comes, the application of the Metaverse needs to map the real world in more real-time and give users "immersive" social/entertainment/meeting/collaboration/travel/shopping/education experiences, all of which are inseparable from larger, Real-time, complex and reliable underlying communication capabilities.

It is foreseeable that the communication cloud service in the metaverse era will explode further, and "Rongyun" will continue to release the core technical advantages of real-time communication to provide support for developers who are interested in exploring in the direction of the metaverse.

On the one hand, it develops spatial audio solutions to restore 360-degree spatial texture in virtual social scenes; on the other hand, it breaks through the social carrying capacity of super-large users. For example, recently, I saw that Rongyun released the industry's first super group PaaS product with a native technology architecture, which can help realize a real-time community form with unlimited number of people like Discord, which can be applied to interest communities, game communities, social squares, and KOL fans. Management, private domain traffic operation and other scenarios. It can be seen that this may be the original infrastructure of the metaverse era, and it is also a forward-looking layout for the future.

Of course, the Metaverse must not be independently defined by an independent manufacturer. Vision, hearing, smell, and even touch, the true reproduction of human complex sensory experience, still requires a long road of exploration. I believe that one day we can join hands to reach this fascinating digital world and write a common story of the pan-industry.

Road Sign 2, 5G+IoT

The "White Paper on China's 5G Development and Economic and Social Impact" released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows that 2021 will be a year of major breakthroughs in China's 5G commercialization.

The 5G network has the characteristics of high bandwidth, low latency and large capacity. IoT, the Internet of Things, is the most typical 5G application scenario. In 2021, the Internet of Things will develop rapidly, including consumer-side applications such as smart home, smart driving, and wearable devices. , and also have industry-level applications such as smart energy, smart transportation, industrial Internet, and smart cities. Data released by IoT Analytics shows that the number of Internet of Things (connected cars, smart home devices, connected industrial equipment, etc.) devices is increasing year by year, and it is estimated that by 2025, there will be more than 30 billion IoT devices connected to the Internet.

The Internet of Things means a wide range of incremental markets for communication cloud services, and communication expands from people to people, to people and things, and things to things.

Intelligent transportation infrastructure needs to coordinate with autonomous vehicles, intelligent inspection equipment needs to send data back to the edge, and intelligent security equipment needs to synchronize data back to the cloud... These ToT (Things To Things) communication scenarios are similar to traditional Internet audio and video Or IM communication is quite different.

There are many types of IoT devices, and the communication interfaces and standards are not uniform; the explosive growth of IoT devices requires higher concurrency capabilities of communication; many IoT scenarios such as autonomous driving have higher requirements for immediacy and safety. Over time or communication errors are likely to lead to security incidents; some IoT scenarios require larger bandwidth, such as high-definition video surveillance; and many IoT scenarios require small data but high-density inter-device communication, such as smart environment monitoring, countermeasures The key technical requirements of weak network are higher.

Only the dedicated communication cloud infrastructure can carry the complex communication needs in the 5G+IoT era. Up to now, there are not many leading players who have strategically deployed IoT communication cloud services. Rongyun is one of them. It has long recognized that intelligent hardware in the 5G era is the next opportunity for communication cloud, and timely deploys intelligent hardware scenarios. Networking has become Rongyun's third strategic track outside the Internet and government and enterprise industries.

The technical basis of ToT communication - IM message service includes text message and signaling channel construction, etc. These are the traditional core advantages of Rongyun, needless to say. Since adding the RTC business line in 2018, Rongyun has also been focusing on providing ultra-high-definition audio and video experience, researching and overcoming technical problems such as high-definition video encoding, AI noise reduction, panoramic audio, and edge computing.

Today, as one of the few communication cloud manufacturers that can simultaneously provide a full communication solution of "IM instant messaging + RTC real-time audio and video + X communication peripheral capabilities", Rongyun can fully adapt to RTOS, IoT-specific equipment modules and specialized Has an operating system, and actively deepens strategic cooperation in the intelligent hardware market, continuously expands communication extension capabilities, and forms "tailor-made" for different IoT scenarios such as wearables, smart homes, intelligent robots, drone intelligent inspections, and industrial Internet. communication solutions.

Rongyun co-founder and CTO Yang Pan once said at a conference, "Adding a CPU to a hardware device means it has a brain; adding a camera and microphone means it can input, with eyes and ears; Speaker, with a display screen, it can express and present to the outside world; if it has wheels, it can also move; if this smart device is connected to the 5G network, it can be always online, then it is already a complete Smart products."

The future is an era of great technological integration. 5G, AI, IoT, cloud computing, blockchain, big data, VR/AR and other technologies will not exist in isolation, but will be deeply integrated to solve real-world problems. Bold prediction: The integration of communication cloud + AI will be a major attraction in the 5G era in 2022, and communication cloud services will be fully upgraded to communication intelligent cloud services.

signpost 3, global

In recent years, the internationalization of Chinese enterprises, especially technology enterprises, has accelerated. After hardware giants such as Huawei, Xiaomi, and TCL, Internet companies such as Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, Huanju, and Chizicheng have gone overseas one after another, competing with international companies in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, America, and Africa. , social networking, entertainment, e-commerce, and live broadcasting have become popular tracks.

For example, in the game field, CCTV news reported that in recent years, the overseas market of domestic games has become an important source of growth for China's game industry. The data shows that in 2021, the actual sales revenue of China's self-developed games in the overseas market will reach 18.013 billion US dollars, an increase of 2.563 billion US dollars over 2020. , an increase of 16.59% year-on-year; another example in the field of entertainment and social networking, Momo has vigorously expanded overseas markets with its Tantan as the pioneer after the domestic growth has been blocked. TikTok will become the world's most visited Internet website in 2021, and Baidu's Gravity will be launched in Japan. The market has performed well, and the lychee voice social product Tiya quickly won the fourth place in the US social application rankings once it was launched...

While Chinese companies are going overseas, the enterprise-level services that serve them are also going overseas. For communication cloud service companies, the overseas market is an extremely considerable increase. It is reported that in 2021, with only Rongyun, the number of overseas customers will more than 5 times. As mentioned earlier, games, audio and video social networking, entertainment, live broadcasting, etc. are popular tracks going overseas, and they all have strong demand for communication cloud services, especially audio and video and IM cloud services.

However, the communication infrastructure in overseas markets is more complex, the communication links are longer, the applications are more fragmented, and the competition is more diversified, all of which put forward new requirements for communication cloud services.

As early as 2016, Rongyun has carried out overseas layout, followed Chinese developers to go overseas, and gradually formed a "one-stop overseas solution". In this process, Rongyun mainly cultivates three service capabilities:

First, consolidate the underlying communication infrastructure to cover the global SD-CAN communication network, combined with the self-developed optimal link scheduling algorithm, to help developers overcome the "last mile" communication technology problem and ensure that their products have low Latency, highly reliable world-class experience;

Second, constantly summarize the local characteristics of each overseas market, and further strengthen the peripheral service capabilities such as data privacy, policy compliance, multi-language real-time translation, and multi-language graphic audio and video review;

Third, provide truly "out-of-the-box" scenario-based products, help overseas brands to innovate agilely in different markets, reduce the cycle and cost of exploring overseas markets, seize fleeting market opportunities, and greatly improve their overseas production capacity and cost. Development potential.

Going global is a must-answer question for all Chinese brands. Unlike the major domestic tracks that have completed the division of spheres of influence, Chinese entrepreneurs are still far from this stage overseas. In the future, the challenges of Chinese enterprises going overseas will come from various aspects such as technology, compliance, localization, etc. In this case, communication cloud service providers that can seize the tide of going overseas and serve the Internet going overseas in a targeted manner will be expected to gain greater opportunities. Increment.

Road Sign 4,

The "Report" shows that from the perspective of the positioning of the Internet communication cloud, the basic capabilities based on the PaaS layer will eventually be packaged by "IM+RTC+X" to serve various scenarios and applications. The new trend of the development of the Internet communication cloud industry will eventually move towards multi-scenario solutions as C-side applications become more in-depth and user needs become more diverse.

Scenario-based solutions are first and foremost inseparable from a deep understanding of the specific capabilities required by different scenarios. For example, in the live broadcast scene, beauty, makeup, stickers, lens flips, etc. are required; in virtual social networking, gifts, red envelopes, voice changes, virtual backgrounds, etc. are required. These capabilities usually require developers to integrate different third-party service providers by themselves.

To this end, Rongyun proposes the "IM+RTC+X" full communication solution, where "X" represents the third-party capabilities needed to help developers access different scenarios with one click, including review, push, beauty and beauty, copyrighted music, etc. , through the "arrangement and combination" of different capabilities, to form a customized solution for each scene. Now, we see some popular fields, such as social interest, entertainment live broadcast, interactive games, overseas business, etc., all have successful "works" of Rongyun solutions.

But that's not enough.

Going a step further, Rongyun is also the first in the industry to launch the third-generation scenario-based SDK products (such as chat rooms, live video, calling, etc.), which encapsulates basic communication capabilities into SDKs that are close to business scenarios, allowing developers to The focus is shifted from technical language to business logic to achieve simple and convenient product construction.

(Rongyun Scenario SDK, Application Scenarios and Solutions)

I have to admit, this is a big improvement. Developers no longer need to do secondary development of front-end and back-end open source code, no need to discover and learn SDKs suitable for their own product scenarios from hundreds of SDKs and API interfaces, and no need to sort out and run-in the business logic of related scenarios. trial. Only fast is not broken, the third-generation SDK has indeed shown intergenerational advantages in the development experience and commercial market.

In the future, there will be more and more SDK products that reduce development difficulty by encapsulating specific scenarios, and product scalability depends on the richness of the scenario content packaged by the manufacturer. Therefore, based on this, a scenario-based solution that understands the expansion capabilities required by a specific scenario will become a new competitive point, testing every communication cloud vendor. And this trend will be even more pronounced in 2022.

Write at the end:

The explosion of the communication cloud service industry in the past two years is just a prelude. Under the major trends of the Metaverse, 5G Internet of Things, communication cloud intelligence, globalization, and scenarioization, the larger-scale growth of the communication cloud service market is a predictable trend, and each segment contains huge new cake. On the one hand, Rongyun has worked hard for many years, and on the other hand, Alibaba Cloud has entered the game strongly. Under the competitive situation, who can get the biggest dividend in the end? Who will stand out in 2022? let us wait and see.